This pasta is taken from the recipe described in Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the kitchen… and is the first of many recipes I want to try from this book. The shapes are very easy to make, and although a little time consuming the end result is worth the effort. The double loop shape is excellent for holding sauce and it feels good in the mouth, almost like a little dumpling. Interestingly all of the examples I could find described as Strichetti are in the bow tie shape rather than this double fold – although the principle is similar, these hold sauce much better. Artusi serves these in broth but I suggest a rich tomato based sauce to serve. I put the sauce in the bottom of the bowl first, then ladled the pasta straight from the pot onto each bowl of sauce, then spooned over a touch more sauce and added parmesan and pepper. Treating the pasta gently like this let it keep its shape very well.
This recipe makes an entree for 4 or a meal for 3.
Ingredients
2 eggs
200g plain white flour. If a firmer texture is liked, substitute 50g plain flour for fine semolina.
Method
Tip most of the flour into a large mixing bowl, keeping a little aside.
Crack eggs into the bowl and stir with a wooden spoon or fork until there are no more lumps. If the dough feels too sticky to handle easily, add a bit more flour at a time until no longer sticky. It’s much easier to add more flour to a sticky pasta dough than it is to have to knead in more liquid to a very stiff dough! When the dough is workable without being sticky, knead for a few minutes until smooth.
Cover the pasta in a bowl or wrap in glad wrap and set aside for 15-20 minutes.
Flatten dough as much as possible by pressing or rolling on a benchtop before feeding through a pasta machine. Pass through the widest setting a few times, folding the strip in half each time.
Divide the strip in 3, then start feeding a strip through progressively narrower settings on the machine until the right thickness – #2 on my machine. Of course, you can just roll it with a pin instead of using a machine.
Lay the strip on a lightly floured board. Use a fluted pastry cutter to cut strips “a finger and a half wide”.
Then cut on an angle to get diamond shaped pieces.
To shape the pasta, pinch 2 opposite corners together firmly.
Then turn around and pinch the other 2 corners together on the other side. Repeat for each diamond before rolling out the next piece. Work fast so the pieces don’t dry too much – I roped in the family to help.
To cook, bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil with a few tsp salt. Add the pasta, and be ready to start tasting them for done-ness soon after they float to the top. Mine took about 60 seconds after floating up to be cooked to my taste.
You can do without a pasta machine if you don’t mind a bit of work with a rolling pin, but a fluted cutter like this one is worth having for this and lots of other pasta shapes! I found my lovely brass one on ebay second hand.
I recently heard about, and immediately had to get a copy of Artusi Pellegrino’s Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well. This amazing book is a huge collection of recipes from all around Italy, as they were cooked in the late 1800s. More than just a recipe book though, it includes anecdotes about popular culture and people in society at that time as well as some context for some of the recipes – the region where it is prepared or even the family who supplied the recipe. I can’t recommend the book enough for anyone with an interest in traditional Italian food, it’s very interesting comparing recipes as we know them now with the versions made 140 years ago. While a lot of things are similar, and arguably modern recipes are more refined in some respects, there are some interesting things here that I am eager to try out.
A few examples that caught my attention – I noted that one of Artusi’s recipes for gnocchi includes chicken breast, mined fine as well as potato. His anolini use a heavily reduced meat broth with beef cooked in broth and simmered for 8-9 hours until a few tablespoons of stock are left – this is used in the filling. The ingredients for Maccheroni Alla Bolognese (Macaroni Bolognese Style) are very similar to how I make it even including bacon, but tomato is not used – although Artusi adds a little tomato paste at a whim to many recipes, the cooking style he advocates is much more fluid than the ingredient lists given in modern cookbooks. The pasta used in this recipe is referred to as denti di cavallo – ‘horses teeth’ sized pasta which are in the form of short tubes, like rigatoni.
I’m a long time fan of Ribolita soup and have always seen recipes that include stale bread in the recipe. Reading the soup recipes in Science in the Kitchen I understand this much better as nearly every soup and many other dishes use cubed bread for thickening or to give body or extra substance. Generally the bread is sliced thin, toasted, then cubed and the soup poured over, although some soups boil the bread along with other ingredients.
There are far too many recipes to detail here but I plan to cook, or at least adapt many of them in the near future. One new pasta shape that I have tried already based on the description in the book is the ‘strichetti’ pictured below, where diagonally opposite corners of a square of pasta are folded together above and below, creating a robust shape that holds sauce very well. This seems to be a variation of the modern, bow-tie shaped version also called farfalle. I’ll write up the recipe soon.
Strichetti, following Artusi’s recipe as well as I can
Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well is available here on Amazon in both hard copy and Kindle versions, including an interesting, quite long introduction with a lot of the back story and history of the book. Although I think the text would be well out of copyright, I haven’t been able to find it on Project Gutenberg etc – please leave a comment if you know where to find a free version. As a footnote – if you’re an offal lover you’ll have a field day here, with recipes and instructions for preparing parts of the animal I didn’t even know people ate. Veal udder anyone? Or maybe you’d prefer some frog risotto?
A staple in my families diet is some variation on bolognaise sauce – a rich, tomato and meat based sauce (although we do a vegetarian version with red lentils too) plus whatever vegetables are around, served with pasta. Zuchini, eggplant, capsicum and mushrooms all make an appearance at times but this is the classic version that we make for pure comfort food. My recipe probably isn’t far from many others – it isn’t a complex dish but so rewarding to make well with good fresh ingredients. I don’t use a lot of meat because I think the sauce should accompany the pasta but not dominate it. Traditional bolognaise recipes sometimes add a little milk or cream when nearly finished – I haven’t tried that yet because I like the rich version so much! Traditional recipes also use chicken liver, but at risk of excluding myself from the rest of the foodies I’m not a huge fan of eating offal.
Note – Katie Caldesi writes in The Italian Cookery Course that smoky bacon is overpowering in bolognaise sauce but I don’t agree (although the book is excellent). However if smoky bacon isn’t liked it can be replaced with a good non smoked bacon or similar cured pork, like pancetta, guanciale, or even diced salami.
Ingredients
1/2 kg (1lb) ground beef – as often as not I use packaged mince from the supermarket but when I have time to grind my own the difference is very obvious.
1 rasher good smoky bacon
1 stick celery
1 carrot
1 onion
2 tins plum tomatoes or tomato passata
1 glass red wine
1 small sprig rosemary – about 1 tsp when diced fine
1 generous pinch dried oregano – the stuff to look for comes from the flowering heads and is a tan/green colour, crumbly with a pungent smell. Plain dried oregano leaves don’t have so much flavour.
1 pinch chilli flakes
1 bay leaf
3 cloves garlic
olive oil
salt and pepper
Method
Dice carrot, onion, celery and bacon as fine as practical. Add to a large saucepan or frying pan over medium heat with 2 tbsp olive oil, bay leaf and finely chopped rosemary.
Stir regularly until well cooked, about 10 minutes. The onion should look translucent and starting to brown and the other vegetables should look soft. Remove the vegetables and set aside.
Add 1 tbsp olive oil to the pan and tip in the ground beef. Stir now and then until the beef is well browned.
Crush and dice garlic and add to the pan together with the vegetables and 1/2 glass of wine. Scrape the bottom of the pan to loosen all the tasty browned bits. Stir the mixture over medium-high heat until the wine is bubbling. The rest of the wine is for the cook to drink while they are hard at work!
I picked up the next step from FX Cuisine . Tip about 1/2 cup of tomato mixture in to the pan and stir until most of the liquid has boiled off. Continue to stir for a minute over high heat. Concentrating and browning some of the tomato like this adds another layer of flavour.
Add the rest of the tomatoes, chilli flakes and oregano. Use a spatula to smash the tomatoes until large chunks are broken up. Half fill the cans with water, swish around, and add the water to the pan too. Reduce to medium heat and simmer for 45 minutes or more, until fairly thick. If the sauce boils down and becomes too dry before 45 minutes is up, add just a little more water. When done, taste and add as much salt as is needed.
Bring your largest pot of water to a rolling boil and add a few tsp salt. Cook pasta until done. This sauce is great with a pasta with some body like fettucine or tagliatelle. Normal spaghetti doesn’t really do it justice despite the name of this recipe – I served it here with fresh bigoli made with semolina, a very fat type of spaghetti with rough edges. I’ve seen the wisdom of tossing cooked pasta through the sauce to coat it well – the extra flavour in each mouthful is hard to argue with. Use tongs or a pasta server to lift a serve of pasta into each bowl, then spoon more sauce over the top.
Serve with grated parmesan and cracked black pepper.
If you liked this…
Spaghetti Bolognese? No Thanks! – A great little Kindle ebook for $3.50 from an Italian about which recipes are and aren’t authentic – I enjoyed it. You can read Kindle books on PC, even in a browser directly now so you don’t need an actual Kindle.
Tomato season is over, just a few stragglers on the vines plus a few that will never ripen now. Yesterday I helped pull down the plants and trellis from my mums tomato patch to make room for something else. I came home with a big box of green/orange/red tomatoes for making delicious green tomato relish. Its great having a few jars of homemade chutney and relish around – they keep well in or out of the fridge because of the vinegar. A sandwich made with this relish on good bread with a nice sharp aged cheddar is heaven!
I based my recipe on Stephanie Alexander’s indispensable The Cooks Companion, but I added apples too since I have some nice ones to use. This is a spicy relish with lots of subtle flavours, but you can change the spices around as you like. Cumin is great in chutneys and relishes so often I use that too.
Ingredients
1kg (2lb) tomatoes – a mixture of green and ripe ones. All ripe tomatoes can be used too for a richer sauce. If you can’t find green tomatoes any supermarket ones will do. See what I did there?
1/2 kg (1lb) apples
1/3 cup white wine vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp seeded mustard
2 tsp Garam Masala
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cornflour
1 pinch powdered clove
1 pinch chilli flakes
1 pinch turmeric powder
Variations
Not everyone likes sultanas in relish but if you do, add half a cup. If you have vincotto, add 1-2 tsp for a hint of sultana and caramel sweetness.
Method
Slice tomatoes and onions. Peel, core and slice apples. It’s easy to nip out the stem bit of each tomato with the end of a knife but not essential.
Tip all ingredients except the cornflour into a large saucepan.
Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Cook for around an hour, stirring every 10 minutes to check it isn’t sticking. Most of the free liquid should be reduced.
Mix the cornflour with about 1 tbsp water and stir well. Spoon out a little liquid from the sauce and mix with the cornflour paste. Tip the mixture back into the sauce pot and stir well. Simmer for a few more minutes.
Remove from the heat. Use a stick blender to break up any larger lumps, but don’t puree it too much – leave some texture.
Taste for sweet/sour balance and if necessary add a little more vinegar or sugar to taste.
Pour into sterile jars – an easy way to sterilise jars is to run them through the dishwasher. The vinegar in a relish makes it unlikely to spoil, so you don’t need to boil the full jars like you would if canning vegetables. If you want to be extra cautious put the jars in a large saucepan, tip in hot water nearly to the top of the jars and simmer for 30 minutes. I always put a tea towel under the jars when doing this so the jars don’t jump around and crack.
It is satisfying to make fresh homemade sausages and I have resolved to make them more often. The whole thing takes less than an hour, and it would be easy to make double the amount and freeze some for later. The best thing is coming up with your own fillings – they can be as crazy or as normal as you like. I have plans for a mega chilli sausage but tonight I did a chicken + fresh herb version. Most recipes call for extra fat for a juicier sausage but if you want a few less calories you can go without – the sausage will be less juicy but still nice.
A few quick tips – Michael Ruhlman in Charcuterie and Paul Bertolli in Cooking By Hand both say a sausage stuffer should be used to fill sausage casings instead of a funnel on a grinder. The problem with the grinder is that chunks of fat can break down too much and then leak out when cooked instead of hanging around to add juicy flavour. This version is the cheapest sausage stuffer on Amazon that gets OK reviews while these ones cost nearly 3 times as much but get much better reviews all round. I’m sold, not that it takes much to make me want a new kitchen gadget, but until I can track one down the old funnel on the mincer is all I have. If using a grinder with funnel, Ruhlman suggests chilling the mince mixture before sending it through the grinder the second time to fill the sausages.
I used to find that fat and sinew got caught on the grinding plate of my grinder, eventually blocking it up and spoiling the texture. It seems like this happens to even the experts sometimes but making sure the die and cutting blade in my grinder were sharp made a big difference. I just rub the flat side of each on a fine diamond stone now and then. Storing the dies and cutter in a zip lock bag with a drop of oil rubbed over stops them from rusting. The other thing that helps is to dice the meat and then pop it in the freezer 30 minutes before starting.
Sausage casings – natural casings need to be soaked in water before use, then flushed through with more water. Synthetic casings can be used dry.
If you notice the mine isn’t coming out cleanly, stop and take out the cutting die – it’s probably clogged with sinew
Making The Sausages
1. Chop fresh spices finely. Grind any dry spices that need it.
2. Cut chicken into rough chunks and spread out on a tray. Put it in the freezer about 30 minutes before grinding.
3. Pass chicken through the grinder – I used the finest die. When no more is coming out take half a slice of bread and send it through the grinder to push out the last bits. Stop when the bread starts to come through. It’s surprising how muc more this gets you, at least another sausage worth.
4. Time to get messy: Put the mince in a mixing bowl with all other ingredients and knead until well mixed and the meat feels sticky – a minute or two.
5. When filling I have been using the largest cutting die on my grinder so it doesn’t clog as much. I fit a length of casing over the funnel, working it right down until no more fits and tie a knot in the end.
6. I can just manage this next bit on my own but it’s more fun with an extra person helping – the meat mixture is fed into the grinder or stuffer and cranked or pressed through the funnel. The person on the casing end lets the casing slip off fast enough for the sausage to be plump but not stuffed tight so that it has room to cook.
7. I fill the whole length of the casing before twisting into sausages. When twisting , adjust the pressure in each link so that it isn’t too tight – keep in mind that twisting will make each sausage a bit tighter too. Alternate which way each link is twisted or else they’ll come undone – eg twist clockwise, then anti clockwise in order.
These were just a bit too tight – a couple split when cooking
I think sausages are best cooked over a moderate heat so they cook through and get nice and brown without burning. I tried par-cooking before I cut the links so the mix didn’t spill out the ends. Seemed to work.
Bangers and mash are a classic so we ate our sausages with buttery, garlicky pumpkin+sweet potato mash and gravy.
Almost all bread, pizza or other baked goods that are meant to be light and fluffy use yeast to raise or ‘leaven’ the bread. The easiest way to do this is to use a commercially packaged yeast but if you have the time there’s another method that offers even more complexity in flavour and texture – sourdough. Sourdough is dough that has been leavened using a portion of a sourdough ‘starter’ instead of a commercial yeast. The starter is just a dough of flour and water that has been allowed to start fermenting so that natural yeasts and other organisms multiply. The starter is ‘fed’ regularly with more flour and water.
Sourdough is very different to normal yeasted doughs in flavour and texture. Lactic acid bacteria produce a sharp tangy flavour, lending sourdough its name (although you can have more or less sourness depending on the balance of bacteria and yeasts in the starter). The consistency of sourdough may also be different, with some sourdough loaves having large irregular bubbles and a chewier consistency – although again this may vary based on the makeup of each starter. Sourdough also has health benefits – more claimed than I’m able to find hard evidence for but some very real. For example sourdough bread has a much lower glycaemic index (GI) value than regular yeasted white bread or even yeasted wholemeal bread! There is some research that shows sourdough breads have reduced levels of the gluten proteins that can’t be tolerated by celiacs. Sourdough also has less yeast than normal bread, important for people who are yeast-intolerant (although it does still have some yeast in the same family as the commercial varieties). Sourdough increases the bodies ability to absorb minerals in the grain by reducing phytate. So there are lots of good reasons to try making your own sourdough before you even consider that it is delicious.
How to make a sourdough starter
There’s lots of different ways of making a starter but the most basic method uses just flour and water. Organic flour is good, but plain unbleached flour works too. The water should be spring, rain or filtered water – most tap water contains chlorine, which will inhibit the microorganisms that want to flourish in the starter. Here’s how to do it:
Clean a glass jar very well. Putting it through the dishwasher is a great way to kill any nasty bugs that are lurking.
Mix about 1/2 cup flour and 1/3 cup water water together in the jar. Cover with a piece of cloth or tin foil (not cling wrap, it needs to breathe) and leave in a warmish spot.
Each day for the next few days, mix in the same amount of flour and water again. If you have the chance, stir well a few times each day. After a few days, you should start to notice bubbles forming in the dough.
Once you have seen these bubbles form, it’s time to change the feeding schedule. Each day for the next few days, first remove half the starter – just tip it down the sink. Then replace with the same amount of flour and water. The goal is to feed the starter with fresh flour without increasing the volume so much that you run out of space in the jar. Eventually the mix will up to double in size in the jar after a feeding, so leave plenty of room.
After 7-10 days, the starter should be healthy and ready to use. It will have an interesting smell, and may have a sharp taste.
To make a dough, I just take a portion of the starter and mix it with the other ingredients. I replace the amount I took out of the starter with more flour and water. If making a lot of dough I will feed up the starter more than usual so there’s enough starter to go around. As a rule of thumb, 1/3 – 1/2 a cup of starter is about enough to make a loaf of bread. Any ‘normal’ recipe for bread, pizza dough, whatever, can be made by replacing yeast in the recipe with some sourdough starter, although it will generally be much slower to rise.
Day 0 – nuthin to see hereDay 2 – a little actionDay 3 – starting to see more bubbles. Yeasty smell.Day 5 – liftoff! That hasn’t happened before. Lots of bubbles, strong yeasty smell, tangy taste. You could start using it from here but the flavour will continue to develop over the weeks to come.
Storing the starter
If left at room temperature, a mature starter should be fed every 1-2 days. For bakers who don’t bake every day and don’t want to waste a lot of flour and water maintaining a starter it can be stored in the fridge for up to a week between feeds. If kept in the fridge it should be removed 24 hours before dough is to be made and given a feeding so that it is active.
What can go wrong
A sourdough starter is a living thing like any other pet. Some bakers have names or special pots or jars for their starter and even take it for walks! Like any living thing a starter can get sick. Here’s how to handle a few problems that might crop up without awkward phone calls to the vet.
Young starters
Depending on the type of yeast and bacteria in the kitchen, a starter might get an imbalance of the bad kind early on. If this happens you may observe the bubbles start, then slow down again. It will come good in time but Peter Rinehart suggests that you may have more luck starting again but using pineapple juice in place of water for the first 2-3 days – the extra acidity will create a less friendly environment for bad bacteria.
Old starters
If forgotten and left too long without food (how could you?), a starter can develop nasty off flavours like a strong funky cheese or even get a ring of mold in its jar. If this happens take a teaspoon of the starter, avoiding any moldy bits. Put it in a clean jar and restart the feeding process from the beginning, adding flour and water until bubbles appear. There should still be enough good yeast and bacteria from the old starter to get things moving quickly again.
Slow starters
If a starter seems very slow to work in a dough, it might be too acidic. Try feeding with more flour and water than usual or discarding more of the starter than usual before feeding. Feed twice in this way before using again. Make sure the water used is free of chlorine. Keeping the dough in a warm place to rise will also help.
Brown liquid on top
Just pour it off.
Cheating
Sometimes my sourdough loaves just don’t rise right. This is part of the fun and with experience you can work around the quirks of your own starter. But if I really want to bake that day I sometimes give in and add some instant dry yeast to the dough to give it an extra kick. It should be dissolved in 1 tbsp water, then kneaded well into the sourdough which should now raise more quickly.
Buying a sourdough starter
If making a starter from scratch isn’t for you, or you just can’t get it to work, plenty of stores sell a packaged version of the same yeasts and bacteria which you can use to reliably get a starter going. This one is 6 bucks on Amazon.
I couldn’t wait to try my new starter any longer so I whipped up a loaf. One of my next posts will be about my basic process to make sourdough bread and pizza crusts.
I was in Melbourne last month for work and my brother in law said I had to go to Hardware Societe. Unfortunately when I got there, I couldn’t get a table or even the attention of a waiter to start the process of getting a table. I gave up on breakfast that morning but I never gave up on the idea of baked eggs and this weekend I did two variations, both with pulses in a tomato based sauce finished with eggs baked on top. This is a seriously hearty breakfast that I plan on eating much more often, although it would make sense to make up the sauce the night before to save time. I’m treating this as more of an amazing new concept than a specific recipe and I will use whatever is in season – I chucked some zucchini and pumpkin into one of my versions too and will be trying one with beans soon.
Baked eggs with lentils
1 cup cooked lentils (or canned)
1 1/2 cups tomato passata or blended tinned tomatoes or plain pasta sauce
1/2 brown onion
1 carrot, peeled
1 stick celery
1 red or yellow capsicum (pepper)
2 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp cinnamon – I love a hint of cinnamon with lentils!
1 tsp paprika
1 tbsp chopped fresh herbs – any of thyme, basil, oregano, marjoram
olive oil
salt and pepper
1 egg per person
Finely dice onion, carrot, celery, capsicum, garlic. Sautee over medium heat in a dash of olive oil till soft, around 5 minutes.
Add cinnamon, paprika, fresh herbs, tomato passata and lentils. Simmer for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. If the mixture gets so dry it sticks, add a dash of water.
Taste the sauce and season with salt and pepper to taste.
Spoon sauce into a casserole dish or individual servings. I’ve been eying off a set of individual casseroles like these for a while but don’t have any yet, so I used large soup mugs. Use a spoon to make an egg sized depression in the sauce for each serve and crack in an egg. Cover the dish (foil works) and bake until the egg is cooked right. Mine took about 15 minutes in a hot oven. I served with a little flat leaf parsley and grated parmesan and of course toast fingers are an obvious match for creamy egg yolk…
My second version replaced the lentils with chickpeas, and I used up a little leftover pasta dough to make a few noodles for the sauce. I did this one in a single casserole. Soooo good!
There’s apple orchards all around my home town and they’ve been busy harvesting this week. My little tree has usable fruit for the first time too!
So I have some nice fresh apples, and today I had a spare dough ball after making lunch. Apple pizza? Why not? Here’s what I used:
2 large apples
1 dough ball
2 tbsp raw sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 tbsp butter
1/2 cup flour
I didn’t have them handy but the pizza would have been even better with
walnuts
sultanas
cream to serve
Not that I need an excuse to use any kitchen gadget but I was glad to get a chance to use my apple peeling machine. When I first saw these I thought they were ridiculous. I was wrong. With this little baby I can peel, core and slice a kilo of apples in a few minutes.
The apple peeling machine. You pull back the shaft and spear an apple…turn the handle, and a blade peels the skin and the apple is sliced and pushed through a corer…voila! Cored, peeled, sliced apple in seconds.
I put 1 tbsp butter in a non stick pan over medium heat and sautéed the sliced apple.
After around 5 minutes it started to look a bit soft so I added 1 tbsp raw sugar and stirred until the sugar was all melted and caramelised. Then I added 1/2 tsp cinnamon powder, stirred and removed from the heat.
Next I made a little crumble topping by mixing 1/2 cup flour with 2 tbsp sugar and 1 heaped tbsp butter. The trick is to cut the butter into little pieces and just rub it into the flour with your fingertips. It should form crumbly clumps.
I shaped the dough ball into a base, scattered over the apple pieces and crumbled the crumble on top. If I had them I would have added a few sultanas and walnuts too.
The whole lot went onto a pizza stone, preheated for 30 minutes in a fan forced oven at 250C / 480F.
I took it out after 6-7 minutes, when the crumble was brown and the edges of the apple nice and crispy. This was one of my best dessert pizzas – just wish I had some cream left to serve it with too!
I served this as a birthday cake last week. The recipe is another that I have stolen from FXCuisine. I hope he doesn’t mind but it’s such a delicious gluten free dessert that I think everyone should know about it! I don’t normally love buckwheat but in this dish it adds a very interesting counterpoint to the almond flavour. One of the guests described it as like eating a giant friand, and I agree. I took the liberty of replacing some of the butter in this recipe with olive oil but you can replace the olive oil in my recipe with 50g more butter if you aren’t so paranoid about your waistline.
Ingredients
250g Almond meal
200g Buckwheat flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
6 eggs
200g butter
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
250g caster sugar
Icing sugar
1 jar of good jam – your choice but I liked strawberry
Method
Separate the egg yolks and whites
Use a fork to mash together the butter and sugar. Mix in the flours and baking powder. Add the egg yolks and mix very well – a hand mixer helps get the batter smooth.
Clean up the hand mixer and use it (or a whisk if you’re a glutton for whisking) to whip the egg whites until they make stiff peaks when you lift the mixer out. If using an electric mixer, don’t lift it out unless it is turned off or the egg whites will make stiff peaks all over your wall.
Add 1/3 of the egg whites to the batter and stir until they are mixed in. Now add the rest of the egg whites and fold them in more gently until evenly mixed. Adding a little of the egg white first makes it easier to fold in the rest more gently.
Pour the batter into a greased springform pan, or a round cake pan with greased baking paper cut to fit in the bottom. Bake at 180C/350F for about 40 minutes or until the top is golden. You can poke a skewer in to see if it is cooked, but be careful where the hole is, this cake doesn’t spring back as much as usual so the hole will be visible afterwards.
When cooked, let it sit in the pan to pull itself together for 5-10 minutes before you carefully remove it to a cake rack to finish cooling.
When cool, very carefully cut horizontally down the middle and use an egg flip to lift the top off. Spread jam liberally over the cake and put the top back on. Put some icing sugar in a sieve or flour sifter and dust over the top.
I served slices with whipped cream and vincotto… yum!
More
You can separate eggs quite well by just cracking eggs into your hands and letting the whites fall through your fingers. If you don’t like getting your hands dirty you can get some cool egg separators – I have one along these lines but you have to see this one too. Words can’t describe the awesome.
There’s no doubt Autumn is here – it’s been raining and leaves are turning yellow and orange. Today as I listened to the wind chimes jangling I started to think of comfort food, and since I have one of the seasons first home grown pumpkins waiting to be used this recipe was a natural choice. I don’t like to brag but my pumpkin soup recipe, refined through the years, is getting pretty good. It helped win my fiancées heart when I cooked it on our first date and if you choose to use it as a love potion too I can nearly guarantee your success.
Use the ripest pumpkin you can find – the flesh should be a deep yellow to orange when cut, depending on variety and the stem should appear dry. I used a butternut (also called a squash in some parts). Some recipes call for the pumpkin to be roasted to deepen the flavour before it is boiled but if you start with a ripe pumpkin, I don’t think it is necessary – although by all means give it a go if the pumpkin isn’t as ripe as you’d like. I suggest about 1kg of pumpkin but more or less is fine, depending on how much pumpkin you have. I used about 2/3 of the monster below.
Ingredients
1 large carrot
1 large potato
1 brown onion
1 ripe pumpkin (about 1kg / 2lb)
1 liter of stock – chicken or vegetable. Or water if you don’t have stock.
1 rasher of good smoky bacon or pancetta
2 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp nutmeg, freshly grated if possible
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp paprika
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
salt and pepper
To Serve
1 small bunch of coriander (cilantro)
sour cream
1. Remove the bacon rind. Finely dice the bacon, onion, carrot and garlic. Add to a large saucepan over medium heat with the butter and olive oil.
2. While you’re stirring the onion etc, roughly dice the potato and peel and dice the pumpkin. It’s easy to peel the pumpkin by cutting thick slices first, then cutting the skin off each slice.
3. Once the onions are starting to look transparent, add the potato and pumpkin and stock. If there isn’t enough stock to cover the pumpkin top up the pan with water. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until the pumpkin is soft and falling apart – about 1 hour.
4. Stir in the paprika, nutmeg and turmeric and simmer for another few minutes.
5. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly. Use a hand blender to puree the soup in the pan until it’s smooth and creamy.
6. Taste and season with salt and freshly cracked black pepper to your taste.
7. Ladle into bowls and add a spoonful of sour cream to the middle of each one. Use a fork to twirl the sour cream in a little whirlpool pattern, but not so much that it is mixed in – just leave a few trails. Scatter each bowl with a little chopped coriander. Serve with a nice crusty white bread and butter.
Mmmmmmm
More:
A good hand blender is the easiest way to get the soup nice and creamy – this Cuisinart one comes in every colour you could want.
Pumpkins are easy to grow if you have a little space, and very rewarding. Here is a pretty good guide.
My recipe is ‘straight’ pumpkin but I love a curried pumpkin soup too – here’s a take on that (and they make it look so good…)
