Category Archives: Food Books

Bar Tartine Pepper Pastes

07/05/2015Bar Tartine, Fermentationdrippyegg

Bar Tartine’s book of techniques and recipes came out in December 2014. I had it on pre order and it was delivered on the day of release. This means that at time of writing some five months later, not enough time has passed to finish a large proportion of the recipes in the book which can take six months to a year!

But some are almost ready; fermented Brussels sprouts have another eight weeks in brine, and the first of my pepper pastes will be ready in about six. Although I’ve been cheating with the pepper pastes from the beginning, tasting them, cooking with them and seeing how their flavors develop over time.

For me the fermented pepper pastes are by far the most interesting technique in the book. There are four different recipes covering sweet, charred, sambal and chipotle pastes, and although the recipes are very different they follow the same basic steps:

– Break down peppers/chillies plus other ingredients to a purée
– Add salt
– Allow to ferment
– Partly dry/dehydrate
– Allow fermentation to continue at low temperature

Some recipes use peppers, some add chili, some add extra ingredients like onions and garlic. Some call for burning and/or smoking the peppers before puréeing. Regardless of the extras the basic technique is the same and once you’ve figured that out you can let your imagination go.

I’ve made several versions including smoked jalapeño (hot as hell) and smoked sweet pepper with tomatoes (smoky & very acidic from fermented fresh tomato), but the best batch so far was made with long red sweet peppers, onions and garlic. burnt over coals, then smoked. It mostly follows the charred pepper paste recipe from the book but also smokes the peppers as in the chipotle paste recipe.

I adjusted the salt to 2% of the weight of the puréed pepper mix rather than quantity given in the book; the original recipe calls for 45g salt per 2.6kg of raw ingredients (1.75%), but as everything gets charred & smoked the weight loss will vary from batch to batch so a post smoking % of salt is more consistent and allows for a variable batch size.

This recipe uses an offset smoker but you can adjust it for whichever smoker you have. You don’t specifically need a dehydrator, if your oven can be set to 43 degrees this will also work but you’ll need to double the drying time.

You will need:

– a large amount of long sweet red peppers, halved and seeds removed
– 1 hot chili of your choice per 5 peppers, halved and seeds removed
– 1 red onion per 5 peppers, sliced into thick rounds
– 1 clove of garlic per 5 peppers, peeled.

Light a chimney of charcoal or briquettes and tip into your BBQ.

Arrange the peppers, chili and onion directly on the coals, turn occasionally until well charred. When nicely blackened move to the smoking chamber (or wherever you smoke in your BBQ) and repeat with the remaining peppers. When done close up the smoking chamber and add some wood/wood chips/etc to the coals (I prefer to use large pieces of wood as they smolder and smoke for longer). Smoke the peppers for 3 hours; in my offset smoker I use a metal pan of water as a heat diffuser to stop them burning.

The garlic needs to be cooked in some way. I found that peeled garlic cloves in the big smoker are impractical, so I use my stovetop smoker to hot smoke for twenty minutes. If you don’t have this option a ten minute simmer in milk will also work.

Once the peppers, chili, onion & garlic are smoked blitz them to a rough paste in a food processor. Weigh the resulting paste and stir in 2% by weight of salt (multiply total weight in grams by 0.02).

Move the paste to a large bowl, lay a clean sheet of cling film directly over the surface to stop mold growth and leave for ten days. Every day remove the plastic and stir the paste, smooth out and cover again with a clean piece of cling film. After two to three days the volume will increase as the paste starts to ferment.

Start to taste the paste around day eight, by day ten the paste should be slightly sour and more complex. When you’re happy with the acidity transfer the paste to a glass dish and dehydrate for 16 hours at 43 degrees until the paste is as thick as tomato purée from a tin. Transfer the paste to sealable jars and store in the fridge for six months to let the flavor develop & intensify.

Grilled Pickled Onions

03/11/2014Burgers, Curing, Le Pigeondrippyegg

This is based on the GPO recipe from Le Pigeon, but I scaled it up and added extra spice. It’s worth firing up the BBQ to really caramalised the onions but a hot griddle pan also works.

10 medium red onions, peeled & sliced into 1cm thick disks
500g red wine vinegar
200g Apple cider vinegar
250g water
10 tablespoons dark Muscavado sugar
4tbs sea salt
a bunch of thyme (about 15g)
a handful of bay leaves
5 cloves of garlic roughly crushed
3tbs yellow mustard seeds
2 star anise
1 cinamon stick
3 chipotle chillies, roughly chopped

If you’re grilling the onions on the BBQ, light it and get a nice big surface area of coals as hot as possible. If you’re using a grill pan turn it onto a high heat and wait until it starts smoking.

Combine all of the ingredients except the onions in a pan and bring to the boil. Simmer for 5 minutes.

Using your hands gently rub vegetable oil onto the cut faces of the onion disks, try to keep them as complete disks rather than separate rings. Working in small batches lay the disks onto the BBQ or grill pan and let them sizzle for 1-2 minutes each side until clear dark grill marks are visible and they smell smokey. As they become ready flip them into the still hot pickling liquid. Repeat with the rest of the onion disks.

When done, let the onions cool enough to handle and transfer to a preserving jar. Let them cool completely then move to the fridge. They’re ready after a week but after 2 weeks they become really special.

When I’m down to about 250g in my jar, I make a new batch and mix the old batch through the new before re bottling, this gives excellent contrast between young, sweet crunchy onions and older soft & sharper onions.

Fermented Chili Sauce

31/08/2014Art of Fermentation, Fermentation, Saucesdrippyegg

I’ve been reading Sandor Katz’s Art of Fermentation on and off for about six months; it’s an absolute treasure trove of information covering more types of fermentation than I even knew existed. It’s also pretty boring so takes time and concentration to read.

I’ve done a few experiments from it, some successful some not so much. This hot and sour fermented chili sauce is version three of a rough formula outlined in the book (the methods in the book are less recipe and more meandering discussions of possible variations of endless possibilities).

You can vary which chilies you use depending how hot you want it, I currently have a plain red chili sauce which is no hotter than Tabasco, and one spiked with scotch bonnets and habaneros which is quite fiery. No two ferments are the same so it’s always exciting to see how the finished sauce will be.

I’ve made this recipe in percentages, meaning the total weight of your chillies = 100%, everything else is a percentage of the chili weight.

Chillies 100%
Garlic 5%
Ginger 2.5%
Toasted, ground and sieved Sichuan pepper 0.5%
Sea salt 2%

Remove the stems from the chillies and finely slice them and add to a metal bowl. Mince the garlic and ginger and add to the chillies.

Sprinkle over the salt and Sichuan pepper, then start mashing it all together; I use the flat end of a rolling pin, you need to mash it for about ten minutes to break down the cell walls of the chili and let the juices out and the salt in.

After ten minutes you will end up with a kind of wet, chili paste, your eyes will stream and your skin will burn.

Transfer the mixture to a suitably large preserving jar. This mashed chili mixture has enough salt to keep bad microbes away but not too much to kill the natural yeasts and good bacteria that live in the chillies. At warm temperatures this will start fermenting in a few hours, in winter it could take a day or so.

Once the chili sauce starts fermenting, lactic and acetic acid is produced, this adds a delicious sharpness to the finished sauce, but also makes the sauce hostile to bad bacteria such as those that cause botulism. The sauce is essentially pickled.

This can ferment for anywhere between two and four weeks, it’s difficult to taste in this state so you need to decide how sour you want the sauce to be, closer to four weeks it will be more sour than at two weeks. Eventually the yeasts and bacteria will run out of food, or the sauce becomes too acidic, and fermentation will stop.

The following picture was taken at 3 weeks, fermentation had almost finished, probably because it was 30+ degrees for most of the three weeks (warm things ferment faster)

When ready, blitz the chili sauce in a food processor and pass through a sieve. You’ll end up with a sauce with the consistency of Tabasco, but infinitely more flavor. Bottle and store in the fridge; the flavor will continue to change(improve?) for many months as it continues to slowly ferment. Keeps for at least three months, probably years.

Banana cream pie

25/08/2014Food Books, Le Pigeondrippyegg

This is the first dessert I’ve made from Le Pigeon, the complete dish should include a soy milk foam, rum marinated pineapple and pineapple sorbet. I skipped that and got on with the tart which was enough work by itself.

This was a very cool recipe which included freezing the pastry cases and baking from frozen and a caramel aerated with baking soda to make the very light macadamia nut praline.

Le Pigeon mash

17/08/2014Food Books, Le Pigeondrippyegg

This recipe uses 680g gruyere cheese, 250g butter & 125ml cream for just 900g potatoes. Onions are glazed with red wine and sugar, then spread on the bottom of a baking dish before being topped with the almost liquid mash. The dish goes under the grill to brown, during which time it sets into something almost solid. Almost.

An utterly bonkers but extremely delicious recipe.

Recipe percentages