Tomato soup and sauce

One day I intend to become an expert tomato farmer, because the processing of tomatoes into sauces and soups is probably one of the most satisfying things I do in the kitchen. I have written about this method for making sauce for pizza, however I now share with you my favourite tomato sauce recipe, suitable for soups, pizza, pasta, or just a great base for whatever else you can think of. This will make 2 X 750ml containers of soup (enough for 2 people in each container) and 2 X 275g of sauce (enough for a large pizza or pasta dish for 2).

Ingredients
300g cherry tomatoes
700g baby plum tomatoes
2 large beef tomatoes
2kg salad tomatoes
2 sweet red peppers
Olive oil
Garlic salt
Black pepper
Mixed herbs

I buy tomatoes a week before I use them and let them ripen and develop flavour on my windowsill. It really does make a hell of a difference. A fresh supermarket bought tomato can last a couple of weeks on a sunny windowsill before its time to worry about rotting.

To start with I put all my cherry and baby plum tomatoes on to simmer in a good glug of olive oil.

The beef tomatoes I chop into chunky slices and the salad tomatoes I cut into quarters. These are spread on a baking tray and seasoned with olive oil, garlic salt, black pepper and some mixed herbs.

The sweet red peppers don't just add an amazing flavour to this, they also colour it. Tomato sauce is orange, by adding the peppers it becomes a richer bright red colour. They're absolutely essential to this sauce. I slice them open down one side and scoop out all the seeds before stuffing them with some of the cherry and plum tomatoes from the hob.

The tomatoes and peppers all go in the oven at 170degC for 40mins, just until they begin to char slightly. Meanwhile the cherry and plum tomatoes should be well softened and will pop and break up easily when stirred. Take them off the heat and blend them, before straining them through a sieve, pushing it all through with the back of a spoon until all you have left is seeds and skins in the sieve. Keep this sauce aside for now.

When your roasting tomatoes and peppers are singed and ready, take them out the oven and drain off all the juice into tall glasses, reserve this oily juice.

As the juice cools the oil will rise to the top, skim this off and keep it. This oil will have loads of tomato flavour, I like to add it to fresh pop corn.

Again blend your tomatoes and peppers before pushing the mixture through a sieve and straight into a large pot.

That's all the hard work done! Now simply add to the pot the juice in the glasses and the sauce from the cherry and plum tomatoes. Stir it all together and bring it up to a simmer. At this point you have a big batch of tomato soup.

About half the mixture I remove into pour and store bags, cool and freeze as soup.

The rest I leave to gently simmer and reduce. As it simmers a scum will collect on the surface. Swoop in with a clean spoon every now and then and remove this before giving it all a bit of a stir. As the sauce gets lower it will spit violently so a loose covering with a spit guard or a towel might be a good idea. The sauce is at the right consistency when you can draw a line to the bottom of the pot in it. At this point half fill 2 jars with sauce. Whilst you do this the sauce is still reducing and will caramelise on the base slightly, which is perfect. Make sure you don't let it burn too much and keep stirring it in. Fill up the jars with the remaining sauce and you're done.

If you're a canning pro then this is the perfect time to use those skills. Personally I just freeze them.

"Southern" Style Chicken

This is a great recipe as not only is it better quality and tastier than KFC but its healthier and a fraction of the cost. KFC is an amazing rip off. I've bread crumbed stuff before on the blog but I haven't really presented it in such a practical way before and I thought it would be fun to show the whole process I do for this recipe.

When I buy a chicken I do it with the intention of getting 3 meals out of it. Considering I pay up to £4.50 for a chicken that makes it £1.50 per 2 person meal, which I consider reasonable.

So I take a good sharp knife a butcher off the legs and wings, then separate the legs into thighs and drumsticks. The crown I roast, we'll eat half on Sunday and then Monday the other half and any left over veg goes in a pie. The limbs go in the freezer until I need them.

I've got some bread that has staled nicely, i.e. it's dry and crumbles in my fingers and hasn't grown any mould. Best way to get it to do this is hang it in an airy bag. Home made rolls and burger buns generally stale very well and it's good to mix up the ones you use.

Using a hand blender I've made this into crumbs. If you have a food processor it's easier, if you have neither use your hands to crumble but it'll take longer. These also go in the freezer until I need them.

When the day comes to make my chicken I take the meat out of the freezer in the morning and give it plenty of time to fully defrost. Then I lay my breadcrumbs out on a plate and season them. The breadcrumbs will be ready to use straight from the freezer.

They need quite heavily seasoning as there's only a thin coating goes on each bit of chicken. You can be quite imaginative with your seasonings and for this batch I've added a generous amount of garlic salt and freshly ground black pepper, then generous half teaspoon amounts of ground nutmeg, ground cumin, galangal, paprika (which is excellent for adding a bit of colour too), garam masala and powdered lemongrass.

The chicken pieces need to be evenly coated in plain flour...

... then dipped in beaten egg before getting thoroughly coated in the breadcrumbs.

Place them on an oiled baking tray and have your oven pre-heated. My fan assisted oven is at 200degC.

I cooked these for 15 minutes, then turned them, brushed with a little more oil and cooked for another 15 minutes, turning once more for a final 10 minutes.

6 pieces of chicken, twice as tasty as fast food and a fraction of the cost.

Pizza

Pizza

There are loads of ways to make pizza, thousands of combinations of base, sauce and toppings and then the ingredients and techniques vary country to country, region to region with different family recipes being handed down through generations. So it's unlikely that my recipe will suit everyone, but this is how I do it anyway. Lets just be safe and say this is how I make what I call a pizza, and if you don't like it then don't call it a pizza. It's still a tasty meal whatever it's called.

When I make pizza I like to take time over it, time most nights that I don't really have, so I tend go do quite a bit in advance such as making the sauce and the dough. To make it really worth while I usually decide I will eat 2 pizzas in the space of a fortnight, so i make 2 pizzas worth of dough and sauce at once. It's not particularly labour intensive, just time consuming and so I tend to do it on a weekend whilst I'm doing a bunch of other weekly meal prep. If I were to freeze the sauce I could make even more of course.

Pretty much essential to a good pizza is a good base sauce and I used to cut corners and just use a jar of salsa until a colleague told me about this method, pointing out that I was wasting fine ingredients on the topping when the flavours were being overpowered by the salsa. I'm glad he did as my pizzas have improved considerably since.

For this I take a dozen or so plum tomatoes, cut them in half and lay then face up in a baking tray. I drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle generously with sea salt and grind over fresh pepper, then cook in the oven at 180degC for about 40 mins.

After they've cooked and softened I push them through a sieve with the back of a spoon.

The sauce is very liquid, too much so for pizza, so I reduce it on the hob over a low heat until it is the required viscosity. While doing this I skim off any impurities that come to the surface.

All done I have a jar of tomato base sauce that should keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks, or the freezer for about 6 months.

Then the dough


I use a straightforward white bread recipe with half the bread flour substituted for plain flour.

I mix it, knead it, then separate it into 2 or 3 freezer bags and leave it to prove for a couple of hours.

Once it's bulked up I take it out the bag, knock it back and knead for another couple of minutes before putting it back in the bag and tying it up.

These then go straight in the freezer. The night or morning before I want to use it I take it out of the freezer. The dough will defrost and second prove in the bag so that when I get home from work it will be perfect and ready to use for my pizza base.

Pizza day


It's now the morning of my pizza making and I take a jar of sauce and a bag of dough from the freezer.

When I get back from work I preheat the oven to 200degC and lightly dust my pizza stone with semolina.

I empty the dough out the bag onto a well floured surface and work it, stretch it and roll it with a floured rolling pin until it is the same size as my pizza stone and even thickness all over. It's about a quarter of an inch, maybe 3mm thick when I'm done.

I transfer it to the pizza stone and punch a few holes in it with a fork to let trapped air from underneath out whilst it's cooking. This is where you can get fancy if you feel like it and do a stuffed crust. Simply roll the base out larger than the stone, put some cheese or salsa round the edge, leaving a half an inch gap from the very edge, brush some water on the gap and fold over the filling and in towards the centre. Make sure it's stuck down firmly. I then put it in the middle of the oven for about 15 minutes.

Once that's done it's time for the fun part! I take my part baked base out of the oven and empty my jar of sauce over the top using the back of a table spoon to spread it all over. Leave none of the surface uncovered, no one like wasted crust space at the edges.

Now the topping. I slice up a ball of mozzarella and sprinkle half of it on the pizza, then layer some chestnut mushrooms and serano ham before finishing with the rest of the cheese.

I've kept this one simple but I've included a list of my favourite toppings at the end of this post. They all work in any combination. Be generous with the toppings, the whole point in making your own sauce was to get the most out of these toppings.

I put the pizza back in the oven for about 10 mins until the mozzarella has melted and started to bubble and brown. I took mine out and sprinkled fresh basil over before popping it back in for another 2 or 3 mins.

All done! Take it out, portion it up and enjoy.

Here are some of my favourite toppings:


Parma Ham


Greek style black olives (dry and salty, really cut through like mild anchovies)


Pepper


Red onion


Talleggio cheese (melts superbly, use half and half with mozzarella)


Sun blushed tomatoes (for a little sweetness)


Pesto


Artichokes


And if you're really wanting to push the boat out, some crispy duck and hoisin sauce with spring onions sprinkled on right at the end is amazing

Parsnip Mash

In an effort to be a) more healthy, b) more organised and c) make my sausages and mash more interesting I've been making my own parsnip mash in advance and freezing it. The day I fancy sausage and mash for dinner I drag the sausages and ready made mash out in the morning and simply reheat the mash while the sausages are baking later. Parsnip is great with pork, it makes perfect sense really!

Quite simply you could boil parsnips, mash them and throw in some butter and garlic, but I find that alone can be a little dull and disappointing. Besides, I'd rather not add butter if I can avoid it.

Use nice big monster parsnips for this job, less peeling and bigger evenly sized chunks for mashing. I do peel, chop and boil half the parsnips...

... but the others I like to bake. I stab them several times all the way round, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with smoked sea salt and fresh ground black pepper and then wrap them up in foil and place them in the middle of an oven at 180degC for about 40 mins to an hour.

The parsnips when they come out need to be tender enough to mash obviously. They should be a golden colour rather than white like your boiled ones and will have sweet caramelised brown juices in the foil tray that need to be added to your mash.

Chop down the middle lengthways and leave to cool. The skins peel easily off and the parsnips can be mashed in with the boiled ones.

Perfect with a good pork sausage, some peas and a spot of gravy. A great winter warmer meal.

Moroccan Lamb Tagine

Right, if I'm going to mess about with something like tagine I'm going all out and I'm going to make this as rich, whilst remaining as authentic, as possible. So I've researched a few recipes, a bit of history, checked up on a few individual ingredients and come up with my own recipe. I noticed that some of the recipes I found had ingredients that had obviously been thrown in for a Northern palate, and some omitted ingredients that really really should be in there. I've gone for a Moroccan lamb tagine recipe and tried to reflect Morocco's access to a wealth of spices and seasonings. Strictly speaking, preserved lemons are probably more often combined in chicken cuisines with olives. I've been looking for an excuse to make some for a while now though and lemon and honey or lemon and coriander seemed to kinda fit, also it would be a shame to waste the opportunity to work with such a classic Moroccan ingredient. I would have preferred to use neck of lamb because it's an awesome and often overlooked cut, but I couldn’t find any and shoulder did the job just as well. I'm not using shank in tagine though, as to me shank = a pot + red wine, onions, garlic, rosemary, cinnamon...

Ingredients
500g Lamb shoulder fillet
350g Tomato
1 large Onion
10 Dried apricots
small hand full of Sultanas (30g)
30 Blanched almonds
1/2 Preserved lemon
2 cloves Garlic
2 Chillis
1 tbsp Honey
2 tbsp Olive oil
1 pint Stock
1/2 tsp Saffron
2 tsp Cumin
1 1/2 Turmeric
1 tsp Ground cinnamon
2 tsp Paprika
a handful of Coriander leaves
a small handful of Mint leaves

Quite an impressive list, but I love this process of collecting and measuring out all the ingredients before I get started.

I put the oven on to 160degC to preheat and began by roughly chopping up my lamb into cubes about an inch or so thick and coating them in the cumin, turmeric, cinnamon and paprika.

I let this sit whilst I prepared the rest of my ingredients. This involved blanching, peeling and coring the tomato; I did this in a bowl so as not to lose any juice as I'll need that in a bit. The weight that will go in the actual pot will be 250g, I put 350g in the ingredients list to make sure I'd have enough after this. I diced the onion, thinly sliced the preserved lemon, minced the garlic and de-seeded and chopped the chillis.

I heated the oil in a pan and fried off the lamb making sure it was evenly coated in oil and browned all round before emptying it into my tagine pot.

Then I fried off my onions in the same pan until they had just begun to sweat and soften and poured in my tomato, juice and all, to cleanse the pan. I poured the onions and tomato over the lamb and then added all the other ingredients, minus the coriander and mint, finishing by pouring the stock all over and sprinkling on the saffron. I gave the whole thing a good stir, put the lid on and popped it in the oven for 3 hours. I think I stirred once in that time, more to satisfy my lust and curiosity for the aromas that were filling the kitchen than anything else.

I brought my pot to the table, tore up the coriander and mint leaves, threw them in the tagine and stirred them in before serving.

It was meltingly tender and incredibly juicy, it needs serving up with a bread to soak up all those juices. I suggest khoubz, which I'll post up the recipe for some other time.

Fried Squid in Sichuan Sauce

I thought I'd finish off my little 5 day Chinese meal event with something a bit special. So I managed to hunt down a recipe that I was able to adapt slightly to use a bit of everything I've been posting about for the past week. Obviously I'm biased, but I think the Sichuan sauce may just be the tastiest sauce I have ever made.

My first job was to get to work on these 2 beautiful squid that my local fishmonger went to the trouble of obtaining specially for me, fresh off the boats at Newhaven Harbour and caught somewhere out in the English Channel.

Here's how to prepare them:

The first cut needs to be across and just under the eye. This chops off the tentacles and you'll be able to easily pop out the beak once separated. Trim the 2 long tentacles to the same length as the rest.

Next pinch the 2 fins together. You can see under the fin where the skin is very thin and rolls away easily.

Once you get your fingers under the skin here both fins and the skin easily all pull away from the rest of the squid in one piece.

Now the messy bit. Gently tug the head away from the body. The insides should follow in one long string.

Finally, pull out the quill.

You may need to go back in and pull out any left over insides this failed to emerge with the head. But when you're done give everything a thorough wash out under the cold tap and you'll be left with neatly prepared and ready to use squid.

Ingredients

2 tbsp Ketchup (see blog post from 06/02/2012 for recipe)

2 tbsp Black Bean Sauce (see blog post from 03/04/2012 for recipe)

2 tbsp Hoisin Sauce (see blog post from 05/04/2012 for recipe)

1 tbsp Plum Sauce (see blog post from 04/03/2012 for recipe)

2 tsp Chilli Paste (see blog post from 31/03/2012 for recipe)

2 tbsp Dark Soy Sauce

2 tbsp Dry Sherry

150ml Chicken Stock

2 tsp Chinese Black Vinegar

2 cloves Garlic

5cm of Fresh Ginger

2 tbsp Groundnut Oil

2 tsp Sesame Oil

I finely grated the garlic and ginger and put them to one side whilst I combined everything else apart from the 2 oils and the chicken stock in a bowl.

Then I heated the groundnut oil in a pan and fried the ginger and garlic for 1 minute...

...before adding the stock and the bowl mixture and leaving to simmer.

Back to my squid... I sliced it up into rings and chopped the tentacles up into twos.

Then coated it in plain flour...

...before frying in batches in some very hot groundnut oil, removing with a slotted spoon into a bowl lined with kitchen towel.

Here's the important bit about cooking squid - Squid goes very chewy and un-appetising if it is cooked for more than 3 minutes, unless you cook it for 0ver 20 minutes which will be long enough to break the proteins back down and tenderise the meat again. So as a rule cook squid for 2 minutes or 25 minutes and you'll be guaranteed soft tasty squid. 2 minutes is plenty of time to crisp up the flour to a golden brown and cook the squid in this recipe.

The fried squid was absolutely delicious on its own. It truly is unbeatable when prepared fresh like this. However, I managed to resist eating all of it then and there and instead poured over my Sichuan sauce.

I then proceeded to sit in my own little private heaven for about 20 minutes. This truly was worth every second of time and every ounce of effort I put into making this dish.