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.

Sun Dried Tomatoes

It's a nice sunny day for a change so I've decided to construct a solar dehydrator.

I'm awful at DIY so I'll be drawing on a childhood of Blue Peter and Art Attack. My materials are a cardboard box, some muslin, cling film, a large bowl and plenty of Sellotape.

I start by cutting off the wings of the box, then half way down one of the sides and cutting a slope to face into the sun.

I need ventilation to remove the moisture but I hate insects, so I've use the off cut wings, cut 2 squares, cut holes in the squares and stuck some muslin to them and sealed all round with Sellotape.

Then I cut 2 holes in the sides of the box to stick my vent covers over.

Next, I stretched muslin tightly over the bowl and secured with string.

I stuck the vent covers go on the sides and the bowl goes inside.

Now for the food bit. I used 5 tomatoes that had been ripening on my windowsill for a couple of weeks. I find that shop bought tomatoes are generally not worth eating until they've had a week at least of sun ripening. I cut them into quarters, skewered them, arranged them on top of the bowl and seasoned with a couple of pinches of light brown sugar, 2 or 3 generous pinches of garlic salt, a little pepper and fresh chopped basil.

I stuck a sheet of foil to the back of the dehydrator to reflect as much sun in as possible and dehydrator Mk.I was complete!

Finally, I stretched cling film over the top, sealed carefully all round with Sellotape and placed it outside in the middle of the garden, turning a couple of times to directly face the sun.

After about 6 hours the sun was getting low, the temperatures beginning to drop and the effectiveness of the sun was wearing off so I brought them in. But they certainly looked the business!

I tried a basil bud I had placed at the front. It was completely crispy, perfectly dried and hot with flavour. The tomatoes were still a little juicy though so I gave them another 2 and a half hours in the oven on a dehydrate setting. They didn't look massively different after that to be honest.

They did taste amazing though. I jarred them in olive oil with a little rapeseed oil.

A few things to improve on for Mk.II:
More foil
Get them outside earlier
Make a tray rather than use the bowl (I was in a rush)

Basil Oil and Bread

I love having my mighty basil plant in the kitchen. I'm so proud of it growing up all big and strong from seed.

Any good basil gardener will tell you that to make a strong basil plant you must pinch off the tips of the stems before they flower. This results in two branches shooting off from where you pinched out, giving you a sturdy basil bush. It also leaves you with lots of little basil buds and sweet tender baby leaves.

I can't bear to throw away something so perfect so I've stuffed them into a bottle and covered them with a good olive oil to infuse in the sun on the windowsill.

It makes an intense basil flavoured oil and I had the perfect use for it when I came up with this recipe (if you want to try this but don't have any basil oil use the best olive oil you can get your hands on):

Soft brown basil bread

Ingredients
350g strong white flour
100g brown bread flour
200ml water
100ml milk
2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp dried yeast
Basil oil
Basil leaves

So, as you might expect, put all the flour in a mixing bowl, put the salt and sugar at separate sides of the bowl and sprinkle the yeast in. Add the milk and water and mix together until you have a good, stodgy, but moist dough mix.

Now, take your basil oil and pour some on your work surface. Kneed and work the dough in the oil. It will become rich and coated in basil infused oil and even squidgier.

To get that silky smooth perfect dough sprinkle a handful of white flour on a clean part of the surface and work the dough a bit more in there.

Use a little more oil to grease a mixing bowl and leave your dough in the bowl to double in bulk. About an hour and a half I would guess.

Knock back the dough, tip it out and work it for a couple of minutes. Now spread it out to a roughly inch thick rectangle and lay on top some tender, fresh basil leaves. Space them evenly but be as generous as you like. I'm a massive basil fan so I go for it.

Roll up your dough and fold round the edges to make a baton. Use more oil to oil a loaf tin and drop the dough in to second prove. In about 45 mins to an hour it's ready for the oven. More oil on the top and some salt sprinkled over, then into an oven at 190degC for about 40 minutes.

The bread is rich and moist and its a favourite in our house.

Delicious on its own with butter, my 18 month old daughter loves it on its own, and if you want a real treat use some of my pizza sauce recipe on it with some mozzarella and pop it under the grill for a bit.

"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.

Beer festival in Brighton

On Saturday I indulged in another rare treat that life sometimes presents us with - the beer festival. If you've read my blog before you'll know that I'm no stranger to ale. This time the venue was Hove Town Hall near my hometown of Brighton. The festival has been hosted here for a good many years now and they've gotten rather good at it. Beer fests can be disasters if managed poorly and without some expert experience but this is not the case with Brighton.

At 11:00 two friends and I queued along with hundreds of other real ale fanatics to enter into the hall where we receive a free glass, brochure and then join another queue to purchase tokens in sheets of 10p squares to exchange for beer. I opted for a half pint glass to begin with as a) I wanted to sample a variety of beers and b) we're short on half pint glasses at home.

I'm naturally a fan of darker heavy beers anyway, but these are especially better suited to the winter drinker than the crisper light styles which I find make fine session pints on a summers day, I did my best to mix it up a bit though.

I kicked off with a Turner's Ruby Mild - dark mild beer at only about 4%. Next I moved onto a light one, Concrete Cow Pail Ale. This is brewed with lager malts, it was weak and I think most of its charm was in the nose which showcased its excellent balance of hops.

My friend recommended the next one - Hip Hop by Langham. It was... fine, if I had to describe it further I would say that it tasted like, well, beer. OK, hoppy light beer, but that's the best I can manage. I followed it up with a local favourite which given that it is the nearest brewery (worthy of mention) to the festival seemed fitting to have - Kemptown Brewery's Red Ale, brewed in the pub I've been going to with my parents since I was a nipper.

Most of the beers I would have loved to try were gone, it was day 3 of the festival and the keen palates of the serious drinkers had drained the really interesting barrels the night before. There were a couple of beers brewed with New Zealand and Australian hops which are favourites of mine, these were gone. But I did manage to find a real treat in my next beer - Rum Porter by Boggart Hole Clough. To me you can't call a beer a rum porter unless you can really taste the rum, and this delicious dark drink delivered delightfully.

Finally, as we approached 3:00 and the morning session was drawing to a close I purchased a pint glass and decided to finish with another speciality beer. I picked out Umbel Magna by Nethergate Brewery. The description in our festival guide read that it was brewed with coriander and I quite enjoy beers with coriander. I think the herb must have been added a little later in the boil as it came through strong in the nose but not so much on the palate, which to be honest suited me just fine as the rest of the beer was nicely balanced and could have been spoilt otherwise.

Time to leave and make room for the afternoon session. Another great festival very much enjoyed, and two more glasses to fill out our cupboard.

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