Sapmi Nature Camp
It’s only 3pm and already the polar light has dissolved from pale pink to icy blue: very soon it will be dark as midnight and the temperature well below freezing.
But inside the wooden smoke hut in Kukkola, a tiny fishing village in Sweden 50 miles (80km) from the Arctic Circle, it’s warm, and bright, and filled with the smells of lunch. Read the full article here
For 20 years, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has made us all think differently about food. So what's next? CREDIT: ANDREW CROWLEY
Can it really be two decades since we first watched Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall wrangle pigs, chase rogue chickens and pluck slugs off brassicas by the light of a head torch at River Cottage? Indeed it can. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the series, which followed the chef as he moved to a picturesque Dorset small- holding in a quest for the “good life”. (For the full story click here )
A new-year diet is often a waste of time and money, but the veg-focused tips here can make a difference CREDIT: ANDREW CROWLEY
Are you dieting and detoxing this month to compensate for that festive blowout? After gut-rending quantities of booze, mince pies and Quality Street, it’s easy to be lured into rapid weight-loss plans and juice cleanses that promise to “flush out toxins” and “reset your health”. But experts are urging us to rethink this annual drive to diet. (To read the full article click here)
Pasta With Gorgonzola, Walnuts, Rosemary and Chocolate. (Photo by Stacy Zarin Goldberg for The Washington Post; food styling by Marie Ostrosky for The Washington Post)
Chocolate and pasta clasped in a warm embrace? The pairing might sound doubtful, but the truth is, cocoa deserves a place in cooking beyond cakes, cookies and desserts. After all, chocolate is sweet only because manufacturers cram it with sugar and muffle its cocoa notes with milk and additives. In their natural state, cacao beans — the precursors to chocolate — carry a wealth of flavors that can deliver contrast, brightness, richness and depth to a raft of savory dishes. If we let them.
In fact, chocolate for dinner is nothing new. We can probably trace its sticky history right back to cooks in the Americas 2,500 years ago or more. Archaeologists believe these ancient people, who revered cacao as a gift from the gods and sipped it in ceremonial drinks, also used chocolate in cooking. Fragments of ceramics found in Honduras, for example, bear traces of cacao alongside remnants of turkey and fish. And a platter typically used to serve tamales has been unearthed in Mexico carrying ancient cacao residue. (We can thank theobromine, one of more than 1,000 compounds in cacao, for this knowledge: Its distinctive biological fingerprints can survive on artifacts for millennia.)
The idea that the ancients enjoyed chocolate for dinner is contentious. Some chocolate scholars argue that cacao was so utterly sacred to the Aztecs that employing it in cooking would have been the modern equivalent of sloshing communion wine in a stew. But I think the theory rings true. The term “mole,” for the ancient family of thick baroque sauces popular in Mexican cuisine, some of which are imbued with chocolate, stems from the Aztec word for sauce, “molli.” Perhaps the ancients prepared cacao-spiked sauces as divine nourishment, just as they prepared sacred chocolate drinks?
Chocolate eventually flowed beyond the Americas to Europe, where it arrived on the Catalan table in the 18th century. Very old specialties such as picadas — sauces of crushed garlic, almonds, fried bread and olive oil — sometimes glinted with chocolate, too. Today these are still stirred into stews and braises at the end of cooking to thicken and round out the flavors deliciously. And Italian chefs in the 19th century working in the grandest and most affluent homes in Europe also embraced chocolate with brio. They deployed what was then an exceedingly expensive and exotic ingredient to showcase their culinary prowess, tossing it into dishes from pasta to polenta. Pan-fried chocolate-coated liver, anyone?
Perhaps some were overzealous, but these chefs recognized an essential truth that has been confirmed since by science: Cacao beans carry a retinue of flavors that work beautifully in savory cooking, just like other seeds such as fennel, coriander, cumin and black pepper. Let’s get geeky for a moment. In their natural state, cacao beans contain more than 600 aroma molecules, the volatile airborne compounds that impart flavors, and these range from fruity and earthy to nutty and toasted. This makes chocolate — not sugary candy bars, of course, but the quality high-cocoa-content dark stuff — a much more versatile ingredient than many cooks realize. Utilized like a spice, chocolate isn’t the star of the plate; rather, it enhances the hero ingredients or adds contrast to other flavors. And the opportunities to wield chocolate in savory cooking are endless.
In the two years I spent researching my book about cocoa, I made many chocolate-scented discoveries. I learned that salty-sweet blue cheeses with a robust tang — like Gorgonzola dolce, for example — yearn for the bitter notes of 100 percent or semisweet chocolate. When you melt the cheese into a gooey sauce for pasta, add chopped toasted walnuts for a rubble of texture and milky bitterness, and then grate a dark nest of chocolate on the top, the result is a flavor bomb greater than the sum of its parts.
I now understand that tomato and chocolate are amiable companions, too. Both carry green aromas, and combining them brings out the best in each other, while chocolate also smooths out the acidity of tomatoes, adding depth and richness to their umami, or inherent savoriness. Grate a little dark chocolate into tomato soup or the classic Sicilian vegetable stew, caponata — go on! — and you will thank me.
All kinds of red meat, as well as chicken, turkey and game birds, get on famously with chocolate. The addition of a swarthy square or two to a sauce or gravy can transform a braise, chili, stew or pie filling into a dish of intrigue, like an unseen hand working culinary magic in the pan. And a mole-style chocolate-scented sauce adds nuance, depth and a whisper of bitterness when served as an accompaniment to any grilled or roasted meat. I’m excessively fond of bathing pulled or shredded roast pork in just such an aromatic liquor and then stuffing it into tacos and enchiladas.
Much like a pinch of salt allows you to perceive sharp or acidic notes more clearly, cacao nibs — broken-up toasted cacao beans and a sadly underutilized ingredient — add a touch of bitterness and a welcome counterpoint in savory salads studded with fruit or cheese. And texture! Nibs yield pops of piquancy and soft crunch in vinaigrettes and dressings. Or, make homemade crackers for cheese and fold crushed nibs into the dough, and you will showcase the gloriously nutty notes in Gruyere or Comté, or the exalted maltiness of brie.
At the very least, assemble some chocolate-scented salt. Into a coffee or spice grinder, pop some good-quality salt and cacao nibs, along with other flavorings you love — dried smoky chiles, dried herbs and spices, or dried citrus peel — and blitz to a fine powder. This heady blend will sit contentedly in an airtight jar by your stovetop, ready for canoodling just as happily with avocado on toast as with stews.
Unsweetened chocolate, the one that’s marked as 100 percent, is the unsung hero of this dish and can be found at Whole Foods Market or online. Lacking sugar, it adds smoky and earthy notes to this rich and punchy pasta dish, lending a nice counterpoint to the salty funk of Gorgonzola. For crunch add some blitzed cacao nibs — and watch your perception for chocolate-as-sweet-ingredient dissipate forever.
Greggs CEO Roger Whiteside at the Kingsway branch of the food outlet CREDIT: ANDREW CROWLEY
Roger Whiteside is a very happy CEO indeed. At the Kingsway branch of Greggs where we meet for our 8.30am interview, staff are so flat-out serving breakfast to a long queue of hungry office types, tourists and construction workers that the boss cheerfully nips behind the counter himself, to find a vegan sausage roll for us to photograph. (For the full article, click here
Credit: Delicious magazine
Many people believe the raw-food gospel. Raw food restaurants and websites have sprouted like alfalfa, proffering the likes of raw pad Thai made from kelp noodles or pizza with a chia and potato crust. The Instagram hashtag #rawfood has 3.2 million posts, a rainbow of raw berry cheesecakes, avocado ‘tacos’ and spiralised courgette ‘pasta’. For the full article, click here.
Crumpet lobster toast served at Rovi in London
boyfriend once wooed me with home-made crumpets. It required time and patience to make them from scratch, but the results were worth it. Hot from the frying pan, with a pat of butter and a pool of golden syrup melting into the honeycomb of bubbles, they were utterly delicious. And, reader, I married him. For the full story click here.
REDIT: EMLI BENDIXEN
‘Excuse me, ladies,’ Mary Quicke murmurs to her cows as she crouches among them to pose for photos. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ she asks, as one plants a wet bovine smacker on her mouth. Quicke doesn’t mind a bit: she is truly, madly, deeply passionate about cows. To read more click here
CREDIT: SCOTT WRIGHT
Have a taste of this: you fancy going out for dinner, so you ask your voice-activated reservations device to recommend a restaurant based on your culinary tastes and budget. When you walk through the restaurant door, staff instantly recognise your face, recall your name and remember it’s your birthday, along with your favourite drink and the most appropriate food for your genetic profile. For the full story click here.
CREDIT: LINDSAY LAUCKNER GUNDLOCK
Martha Ortiz glides through Mexico City’s San Juan market like a ballerina, reed thin and elegant. She pauses at a produce stall, a kaleidoscopic tower of fruit and vegetables, and extends a lissom hand to accept a slice of a red-fleshed pitahaya. Onwards to a chilli stall, fragrant with smoky spices, where she wafts a pasilla mixe variety under her nose, as gracefully as if it were a rose. For the full article click here.
It's long been claimed that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but new scientific evidence suggests this might not be true for all of us. Sue Quinn investigates and offers three healthy breakfast recipes if skipping breakfast isn't for you.
For years we were told that dietary fat was bad for our health and our waistlines. But newer research shows that some fats are good for us, and that low-fat diets might actually cause us to pile on the pounds. Confused? To read the full article click here.
WastED, the sell-out pop-up restaurant at Selfridges in London, is proving kitchen leftovers can be turned into spectacular meals.
During his five-week residency, the New York chef Dan Barber, along with guests including Fergus Henderson, Raymond Blanc, Alain Ducasse and Jason Atherton, has transformed ingredients that would otherwise go to waste (stale bread, cheese trimmings, pockmarked potatoes) into feasts, such as the cores of spiralised vegetables served with a cream made from tinned-chickpea water, and the restaurant’s signature dish of a whole charred cod’s head whose meat is excavated by diners. To read more click here.
Photograph: Jonathan West for the Guardian
Showered in chicken salt, Australia’s favourite seasoning, these trashy-yet-tasty takeaway-style potato scallops are Sue Quinn’s taste of home. You can read he full article here
Coffee infused with nitrogen sounds more like a recipe for an explosion than coffee's latest trend. Sue Quinn explores the opportunities it presents for independents. Read the full story here
Here’s the thing: all that most people really want from a coffee shop is a quality hot beverage. But these days, this simple daily pleasure is leaving a bitter taste, at least for this coffee drinker.
Click here for the rest of the story
CREDIT: HAARALA HAMILTON & VALERIE BERRY
A symphony of spice has been wafting through my Instagram feed lately, the images so vibrant I can – almost – smell them. There’s ruby-red goose vindaloo scattered with caramelised onions; slow-cooked lamb shanks in a sauce so rich I want to bathe in it; fried eggs on chilli-cheese toast with masala beans. This is Indian food UK-style in 2017. And there’s not a chicken tikka masala to be seen. To read the article in full, click here
Image: Delicious Magazine
Add a splash of fruit flavouring and a drop of antioxidant and suddenly what looks like a plain old bottle of water becomes a must-have superfood with a supercharged price tag. What a wheeze, says this food writer.
Read the article in Delicious Magazine: The Rant - Down with Bottled Water >
