… mince. That’s it plain and simple, mince is what the horse scandal is about. Somewhere along the line from field to shelf, horse has swapped for beef and then minced. The latest twist is that an anti-inflammatory drug has been found in some batches of horse carcass. Journalists have jumped all over “bute” and what it does, but not really looked at the facts. A horse would need this drug about three times per day. Even if the horse was killed at the peak level of the drug in it’s body, broken down and sold as meat, there would be no danger to humans. The level of chemical in the perfect meat specimen would be so low. Enough of the scaremongering, now for the cure.

A lot of the suspect meat has been traced to processed ready meals. It is easy to hide less popular cuts in the mince in these products. It is also becoming apparent that price has been the turning point for the labelling fraud. Luckily many of the products which are “contaminated” also have very little meat content. When a business wins a contract on price alone, there will become a limit to cost cutting. Food laws make it very specific over % of meat content, which meats you can use and also how they are prepared. At some point you can go no cheaper.

If you are worried about the food you have at home, then start from the raw ingredients. You can buy mincers for your home kitchen. They range from the small hand powered ones to electric. The ones driven by handles are great for small batches. Neither are really expensive, ranging from about £20 to £100. The automatic ones tend to have a few extra widgets thrown in, so not just mincers. So you have your carefully selected cuts of whatever meat you want to use going in and mince coming out. What to do with all this mince?

How about this for a short list:
Burgers
Sausages
Meat balls for sauce
Meat balls for soup
Spag bol
Chilli con carne
Lasagne
Cottage pie
Canneloni
Mince and onions
Shepherds pie
Stuffed peppers
Keema curry
Meatloaf
Kebabs

The beauty is that most of these can be made in bulk and also frozen. Even just part cooked  mince and onions can be stored away for a simple base for the above. If you are worried about your consumption of red meat, don’t be. You can mince chicken and turkey too.

Is it fair to say that there is still a lot we don’t know about horse meat? Allegations are flying left right and centre over where the contamination came into the food chain. I suspect there are plenty of innocent people being accused of all kinds of things by a torch bearing mob.

The truth is simple though. Horse meat has been found in a number of ready meals and pre-processed products. In one example, a lasagne, the meat content was 100% horse. We possibly may never find the whole truth as this has to be a highly organised fraud, possibly spanning several legal jurisdictions. This is no accident caused by failing to wipe down a cutting table. Paperwork has been falsified and several organisations duped. Some abattoirs handle horses. Some cutting plants handle horses. It’s licensed and has been going on for years. This is probably where a witch hunt will injure the innocents. What is the crime is the switching from calling it horse to calling it beef. Whether the horse was destined for the human, pet or other markets is another consideration if the fraud is so organised.

A lot of what happens in the food industry is down to the flow of trust. Not just blind trust, but that the right people have filled in the right paperwork. The audit trail is very clear and several professionally qualified people are involved in that process. In the UK, to get beef to the butcher, at least one vet has signed off the known cattle. There is a passport, a vet certificate and a clear flow of paperwork all the way through. When meat arrives, it is clear what it is, where is it has come from and who handled it.

Since 2008, that’s exactly how we have done things. When you make your own produce, you know what has gone into it. You know when you have got it right when you see the farmer sat in the restaurant. That is ultimate quality control. In 2010 the National Farmers Union (NFU) awarded us their Local Food Champion Award. We know our meat, where it came from and how it got to us. We have worked with the same breed of beef since 2008 and know how to respect it when the meat is delivered to the kitchen by Ian Barker.

A few years ago we got interviewed by those lovely people at Wiggly Wigglers. Heather (@Wiggled on Twitter) mentioned that the supply chain was about traceability. Her husband Phil (@FarmrPhil from Twitter) is a beef farmer and an expert in his domain. Chef Dan answered with a simple phrase “it’s all about blame”. Trust is ultimately about responsibility. We trust our supply chain. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t use the same butcher for our family meals.

This has got to be one of my favourite food days, Shrove Tuesday. Childhood memories of pancake races and lemon pips come flooding back. Like all great traditions there is also the history behind it. Shrove according to the lovely Alan Coxon on Twitter this morning “The word comes from the old English word “Shrive” meaning confess and also from the Christian to be Shriven!”. It all kicks off Lent with a fling before the feeling of obligation and fasting. Other countries have a similiar tradition, think Mardi Gras!!

Pancakes are served in one way or another all over world. Thankfully not just for pancake day. Who can remember those thick pancakes with maple syrup and ice cream? These were a Little Chef favourite and an all day treat. Scotch pancakes, like my grandmother used to make, served cold with butter for supper. The Potteries have their oatcakes and pikelets. Blinis, potato pancakes, crepes, johnnycakes and even dosas are household names. The Dutch serve them with bacon and cheese. A pancake has to be one of the most versatile, economic  and delicious dishes out there. As a close relative of the Yorkshire pudding, it’s probably a little more popular than we think?

Anyway a quick recipe (Courteousy of Delia Smith):

110g/4oz plain flour, sifted
pinch of salt
2 eggs
200ml/7fl oz milk mixed with 75ml/3fl oz water
50g/2oz butter

Start by mixing the egg, salt and flour until you have a paste. SLOWLY add milk and water mix and whisk as you go. Carefully watching for lumps. Melt the butter gently in a pan. Add 2 tablespoons of the melted butter into the batter.

The real secret to pancakes lies in the heat of the pan and keeping the pan non-stick. Rub the pan down with the butter and keep some oil on the side to keep it non-stick(ish). In all likelihood the first pancake will be a mess. Not sure how that happens, but it does seem to make the pan better for the next one. If you don’t want to flip or turn you can place under grill.

Serve with? Sugar and lemon juice are traditional, some many other things to choose from though. One final piece of advice, watch out for the lemon pips.

The above is Chef Dan(iel)’s home-made corned beef. It took him about a week to get this recipe completed and for good reason. Before we go further this corned beef is also called salt beef in the UK. What we would normally refer to as corned beef is a new(ish) British dish called bully beef. Apparently the bully bit comes from a French word to mean “boiled”. Originally a military ration, this was minced beef, preserved in jelly and it’s own fat.

An older recipe, also called corned beef, is the salt beef. This was preserved for long journeys at sea and for trade. Somewhere back maybe up to a thousand or years or more ago, corning was a term for brining or curing. Like a lot of preservation methods this was essential as you didn’t travel far, populations were small and animals were still near the same size as they are today. If you didn’t stretch out the meat, it rotted.

So what did Daniel do? He developed his own secret brine recipe which is part alchemy but mainly for flavour. The meat was trimmed and put into the brine for a few days until it penetrated all the way. One of the components of the cure is pink salt. This is also called Prague powder no1 or curing salt no1. It is mainly salt but also a small amount of sodium nitrite. Pink salt is called that because it creates a reddening of the meat and shows its coverage.

Basically this is the original corned beef with a modern touch or two.

We are often told to lay off ordering one fish or another. The usual reason, a sound one, is overfishing. Fish have seasons, demand, breeding cycles, food chain and other factors which affect what is sustainable. A big one here from the human side is demand. Close your eyes at the end of the next two sentences. Imagine you are in your local fish and chip shop. Which three fish would you see on the board?

OK, so how many of you got cod, plaice and haddock?  Haddock is rated as “should probably not be considered sustainable at this time”. The other two are “should not be considered sustainable”, which is slightly worse. The Marine Conservation Society publish a sustainability score. This goes from 1 which is most sustainable to 5 which is avoid.  Swings in demand, taste or fashion really impact sustainability.

An example is the handsome chap above, the monkfish. Once upon a time golden deep fried scampi would be monkfish. Scampi or langoustine or Dublin Bay prawn was seen as expensive and the monkfish was not a pretty sight on the fish counter. It was seen almost as waste, so “scampi” was a by product. Monkfish had a bit of a turn round and the tail become very popular. Now it’s less sustainable than real scampi.

A message a few years ago was to eat mackerel. Again it’s been pushed closer to the wrong end of the scale. This happens with most fish sadly. It was not long ago that oysters were cheaper than lamb so hot pot contained a layer or so. Each time a species moves towards endangered another is often heading in the other direction. Atlantic haddock, pollock , some species of crabs and prawns are great choices. Who would have thought that the darlings of the bistro, the seabass and the mussel, though very popular are very sustainable.

The sustainability of fish species is constantly changing. For up to date information have a look at The Marine Conservation Society website. There is an app and a downloadable Good Fish Guide plus plenty of information on the site.

You really cannot go wrong with Mark Hix. Thankfully, he’s stuck to his core, restaurant cooking. This whole book is about cooking in the oven, more specifically baking. Given the current TV trends, this book has not jumped on the band wagon of cakes all the way.

If you were so minded you could easily cook a whole meal with this book. There are breads, pastries, biscuits, sweet tarts and cakes. One the other hand there are savoury biscuits and tarts. There are the real winners such as: baked bone marrow with oysters, baked salmon with honey mustard and dill, veal baked in hay,tamarind back ribs, pommes anna, baked sweet potatoes with honey and chilli, baked duck’s eggs with wild mushrooms. The savoury pies are classics.

With some careful planning you could really get away with very few pans on the top of the stove and most of the work inside. It’s a great book for patient cooking and really bringing out flavours only achieved through slow cooking. For a real treat, nothing to do with horse(meat), try the sea biscuit recipe. Homemade savoury biscuits for snacks or ideal with a cheeseboard.

Another Great, British cook book for the shelf.

Available from Amazon
Mark Hix on Baking

So how do you get the perfect burger? And is it safe to eat?

The answer to both questions is … make it yourself.

You don’t need any fancy cuts of meat, often the opposite is the best. Most cuts of steak are absolutely fantastic under the grill, in the frying pan or over the coals. Please respect them by showing these expensive cuts for what they are, great steaks. On the other hand there are burgers which contain rare breed beef like Angus or even Kobe and Wagyu. There is probably a good reason for this, the ribbon like marbling of fat within the muscle. Fat is essential to a good burger. It binds the loose meat together and of course adds flavour. Several years ago mince came as a very grainy product and was difficult to hold together without excess pressure or something like oats and egg.

Making burgers at home doesn’t even need any extra equipment. In our kitchen cupboard we have two burger presses (1/4 and 1/2 lb) and a double iron for moulding them. All of these gizmos have been ditched in favour of a 1/2 cup measure. This holds 125ml of fluid so roughly about a quarter pounder. Very easy technique, press the mixture into the cup and then flick it out onto work surface. Press with heal of your palm to form a patty and that’s it.

The real secret to a good burger lies in the ingredients. An ideal cut for this is chuck, which comes from around the shoulder area of the cow. It has a fair content of fat and great flavour. Ask your butcher to mince on a quarter inch plate the quantity you want. For adults you might want 2 burgers and for younger diners, maybe 1. Work that out as 4 per pound. Add 1% salt, preferably fine ground, to the mince and mix well. The salt makes the meat more tacky which means it forms the patty with ease. The raw burgers also freeze well.

Two recent stories in the press really got my attention this week. The main one is the controversy around horsemeat being detected in products labelled as beefburgers. It wasn’t even a trace or contamination but about 29% of the product contained horse DNA. There are two real problems here; first the label didn’t have any mention of horsemeat and secondly, the scarey bit, the traceability of the meat was falsified. From birth to death all cattle must have a “passport” which must go with them when they are transported. If the herd is at risk from disease they can be banned from movement or even put down. This works out that an animal with a clean bill of health from a herd with no problems can make its way to the abattoir. From there the carcasses are controlled and recorded. In the meat processing plant, this control goes all the way to the finished package. You know you have a particular species in the packet and documentation showing which carcasses got used in each batch by who.

The rules on burgers are very clear,  a minimum of 62% of a named meat must be used (47% for economy burgers). A percentage of each meat must be shown and then any other ingredients listed, but not necessarily by amount unless over certain tolerances.

Some examples from a supermarket website (not one involved in the current scandal though)

Basic hamburger: Beef (39%), Pork (39%), Water, Onion, Rusk
Their premium steak burger: Beef (93%), Onion (4%), Rapeseed Oil
Lamb burger: Lamb (86%), Mint (6%), Onion, Seasoning

So given the above clear labels, why did close to one third of horse end up in the other chains burgers?

The second story.

Westminster council are alleged to have gone on a crackdown on rare burgers. An example of one of the stories comes from The London Evening Standard. Like any good story there are two sides. Westminster contend that there is a known risk in rare meat caused by E.coli. This particularly nasty pathogen comes from the ground, through the digestive tract and on slaughter could contaminate the outside of the carcasses. Any restaurant buying their mince in, could have some traces of E.coli as the pathogen has been ground from the outside into the product. If so, then this meat needs to be cooked to safe temperature to kill the bug. Then you no longer have a rare burger. The restaurants in question argued that many places serve steak tartare which is either raw chopped or minced beef. At this point it does seem a bit harsh. Now when the council managed to get a word in edgeways it makes common sense. If you use a whole cut of meat and sear the outside, you have mitigated the E.coli risk. After this, shave off the seared layer if you want, but it’s all ready to mince or chop for rare or raw.

The moral of these tales?

If you want a burger you can trust; know your butcher, buy you whole beef from them, sear it and mince it yourself, then make your own.

(c) Benutzer:burgkirsch

Just for the sake of clarity, yes, the above picture is a pile of peaches. Toast and peaches and sauce all make sense when you add the word Melba. Indeed Melba is the one and same reference in each, Dame Nellie Melba. She was a Victorian opera singer who was born in Australia. Much of her naming of dishes came about when she stayed or should we say practically lived in the Savoy in London.

During that time the head chef was a man called Escoffier. Auguste Escoffier is the man who is credited almost single handedly with the development of the modern kitchen brigade and the specialism of each chef within. His book Le Guide Culinaire is still revered as the serious chef’s bible. So Escoffier worked for a guy called Cesar Ritz, name sound familiar? Ritz at the time was the manager of the Savoy in London.

The story goes that Dame Melba became quite ill and Escoffier was tasked with making her something light. He came up with Melba toast which is now seen as a measure of how a chef has mastered the basics. Nowadays you would grill a round or two of sliced bread. Cut off the crusts and then slice across the soft centre to create two very thin slices. The raw side of the slice would now be grilled and err … voila, you have Melba Toast. Sliced bread was not commercially produced until 1928, this was 1897, so Escoffier had to do this process, carefully, by hand.

Such was the loyalty of people in those days that when Ritz was disgraced at the Savoy, he left and founded his own hotel empire. Escoffier followed behind him to become his new Head Chef. Finally, Dame Melba moved hotels too. Whatever the very thinly sliced toast may have originally been called in the great French tomes of cuisine, it is still today, Melba toast, named in Britain.

Firstly an apology to Andy Darlington who wrote the article, it is Peter Oldfield who is the oatcake maker.

Secondly, it should have read that Derbyshire oatcakes were new to me not just new. They have been around since the 17th century, so not exactly new.

There you have it, we have just seen chocolate week (8th – 14th October 2012). Yes, a whole week dedicated to chocolate. A Saint get’s a day and chocolate gets 7 of them. Chocolate is one of the most diverse foodstuffs. It can range from the synthetic sweet flavoured candy to bitter high cocoa real chocolate. The extremes of that taste spectrum also appeals to an equally wide spread of ages.

Chocolate comes from the seeds of a tropical pod that grows on the cacao tree. There are a lot of similarities to coffee in this comparison. Both are seeds from a fruit and both get dried before further processing. The higher the content of the resulting cocoa the perceived higher quality of the chocolate. Chocolate is a very complex product. Even with the various ingredients listed on the bar, this only touches the surface. The raw cocoa contains many chemicals, some which could be responsible for mood change; tryptophan, theobromine and serotonin.

The last one, serotonin, is the molecule above. Lowered levels of serotonin in the body could be partly responsible for depression. The body breaks down serotonin so naturally we can be removing this feelgood chemical. Many modern anti-depressant are selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRI). This means that they block part of the effect of the removal of serotonin. So chocolate in moderation can boost your mood.

I was shocked to hear about the demise of the Staffordshire Oatcake, he was alive and well last week. The announcement was made in an article in Taste the Seasons, which is the food and drink magazine for Derbyshire. Now the second surprise was the news that Derbyshire also have an oatcake which does look a lot like the Staffordshire classic.

Veteran Oatcake artist Andy Darlington has been making them for 40 years. Every week he turns out nearly 15,000 each week in his kitchen in Calver. He tells us that he “wouldn’t let it go the same way as Staffordshire”. It appears that this all came about as a result of a story in The Sentinel, Stoke on Trent’s daily paper. An old hole in the wall oatcake shop had been closed and demolished as a result of the councils efforts at regeneration.

The good news is that traditional oatcakes production is alive and well in the Potteries. A few shops have closed in recent times but there are still plenty to go round. Most of the shops are open early morning till about lunchtime and serve the oatcake with a variety of fillings or just on their own. As well as this there are pikelets which are thicker and contain dried fruit such as currants.

The most famous shop is High Lane Oatcakes which was one of Rick Steins local food heroes. While is was a shock initially, the great outcome is that we now know there is the Derbyshire oatcake out there as well as our own county’s.