Recipes

In a bid to get better at cooking, I'm picking a new food each month and trying to perfect it. Here are my favourite recipes so far, along with some tasty context.

Egg custard tarts with sweet shortcrust pastry

This recipe makes six tarts, which is plenty, you fat pig.

For the pastry

120g plain flour

60g unsalted butter (must be cold)

30g icing sugar

1 egg yolk

For the custard

120ml whole milk

100ml double cream

1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon

2 eggs

30g caster sugar

1/2 nutmeg

1. Cut the butter into chunks then chuck it into a food processor along with the plain flour. Blitz it for ten seconds until it looks like breadcrumbs, then add the icing sugar, egg yolk, and 2 tablespoons of cold water. Keep pulsing it, on and off, until this mixture comes together into a dough (should only take half-a-dozen pushes - if it’s not coming together add just a little more water). Gently work the pastry into a ball on a lightly floured surface, then cover it in cling film and whack it in the fridge for an hour.

2. After it’s done cooling, grease the bottom of a muffin tray then roll out your dough so it’s the thickness of a £1 coin. Using a cutter, or large mug, cut circles out of the dough then gently place these into the muffin tray compartments, making sure the dough comes to the top and there are no big air bubbles underneath (just lightly squidge them down with your thumbs). Prick the base of the tarts with a fork then put the tray back in the fridge for 30 minutes.

3. Heat your fan oven to 180 degrees, then cover each individual pastry tart with baking paper, making sure you cover the pastry completely, then fill them with ceramic baking beans or rice. Cook them in the oven for 12-15 minutes, then take them out, remove the baking beans and baking paper, and give them another 5 minutes in the oven to brown the bottoms. (This process, of cooking the pastry before the filling is added, is called ‘blind baking.’)

4. Meanwhile, add your whole milk, double cream and cinnamon into a saucepan and gently heat it on the hob, continuing to stir from time to time.

5. Put your caster sugar in a heatproof bowl, then add 1 whole egg and 1 egg yolk. Give these a moderate whisk and bring them all together.

6. When the milk has reached 80 degrees, you’re going to add it to the eggs and sugar in the bowl. This is called ‘tempering’ and the key is to add the hot milk very slowly at first, whisking all the time: you don’t want to shock the eggs into scrambling by raising the temperature too quickly, so you’re trying to gently get them there. Continue pouring until all of the milk has been added, stirring the whole time, then strain this mixture into a pourable jug.

7. Turn the oven down to 140 degrees then pour the custard into each of the individual tarts, taking the level right to the rim of the pastry. Grate a good dusting of nutmeg onto the top of each tart, then put them in the oven for 10-15 minutes.

   
   

   Now, experienced bakers will be able to judge when the custard is ready by eye, and they suggest taking the tarts out when ‘there’s still a bit of wobble on the custard but not too much.’ Obviously that’s mental advice, so I prefer to use a thermometer, and you want the custard to reach a temperature between 75-79 degrees (if it goes over 83 degrees the eggs will start to scramble). When they hit that temp, turn the oven off and open the oven door but leave the tray in there for 5 minutes, as you don’t want them to go from hot to cold too quickly. Then bring the tarts out, allow them to cool completely in their tray for about an hour, and tuck in.

Context

• Pastry: Most pastries are made from a relatively low protein flour (like plain flour), a fat (like butter or lard), and a little liquid (such as egg or water). Sweet shortcrust pastry includes sugar as well, obviously.

• When making a regular bread dough, you want to use quite a bit of water to fuse the particles of wheat together and encourage gluten development, but with shortcrust pastry we don't want this gluten development. The pastry is called 'short' because we want to keep the gluten strands short, instead of long and elastic - this is what creates that crumbly, melt-in-your-mouth texture, rather than a chewy, doughy one. So we aim to use as little water as possible throughout the process - and it's also why we begin by rubbing the fat into the flour (or blitzing it in a food processor), so we can effectively waterproof the grains and prevent too much gluten development.

• Fats, like butter and lard, are a collection of molecules in both solid crystal and liquid form. Above 25% solids, and the fat is too hard and brittle to roll into an even layer of pastry, below 15% and it’s too soft to work, meaning the dough won’t hold its shape and will leak liquid. Butter has the right consistently to make pastry when it’s between 15-20 degrees (lard is useable up to 25 degrees). This is why you have to make sure the butter is cold before you start, that you don’t overwork it with warm hands, and you have to keep chilling the dough at various stages, so it doesn't become too hot, leak moisture and shrink during cooking.

• Eggs: Both the white and yolk of an egg are essentially bags of water containing dispersed protein molecules. When you heat an egg, the proteins unfold, tangle with each other, and bond to form a network. While there's still much more water than protein, this new protein network traps the water, meaning it can’t flow anymore, and so the egg becomes a moist solid. However, if you heat the egg too much, you cause the proteins to bond exclusively to each other and force the water out of the network completely, which is what happens when you get rubbery eggs, or your scrambled eggs split into water and eggy lumps. So the key to cooking all egg dishes, including custards, is to heat them to the point the proteins come together but not much more.

• Adding milk or cream to the egg disperses the protein molecules even further, but they will still be able to set a liquid into a solid gel, or custard, at the correct ratio. The key ratio to remember is that 1 whole egg will set 250ml of liquid.

• There’s actually quite a lot of leeway with custards, and you can use any combination of milk, cream or alternative liquids as long as you stay within the 250ml ratio. Also, you can add a lot more than one egg to that 250ml. Going on the basis that one egg white, or one egg yolk, equals half an egg, you can add any combination of these to create any texture you like, remembering that egg whites will create a stiffer custard, while egg yolks will make it creamier. So if you add 2 whole eggs to 250ml, you’ll have something akin to a crème caramel, while adding 4 egg yolks to 250ml will create a crème brûlée texture. For his award-winning custard tart, Marcus Wareing uses 9 yolks for 500ml of whipping cream. Seems a bit much.

• FYI, the best books I've read for this sort of context are Lateral Cooking and On Food And Cooking.

Spelt Soda Bread

Ingredients (makes a small loaf)

200g Wholemeal spelt flour 

150g Plain flour

25g Rolled oats

300ml Buttermilk

3/4 tsp Bicarbonate of soda

1/2 tsp Salt

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees (220 if you don't have a fan oven) then stick a baking sheet on a tray.

2. Grab a large bowl and add all the dried ingredients: both the flours, the oats, the bicarbonate of soda and the salt. Give it a good stir and make a well in the middle.

3. Add the buttermilk while gently stirring with a fork to bring it all together. You're looking to hit that sweet-spot where the dough is soft and mouldable but not too wet and sticky - annoyingly the consistency of buttermilk is slightly different at each supermarket (Tesco's buttermilk is more like milk while the Sainsbury's one is thicker like yoghurt), so you might need slightly less than 300ml or slightly more. But don't panic, you can't go too wrong with 300ml, and you can always add a dash of regular milk if you don't have enough buttermilk left.

4. On a floured surface, gently form it into a ball, but don’t knead it and don’t be too rough with it. Place it on the baking sheet and flatten the top down so it's a low dome shape, about 4 cm deep (it isn't going to rise a huge amount during baking so don't make it too thin). Dust the top of the dough with a little extra flour.

5. Grab a sharp knife and score a large cross along the top, going quite deep with this cut (about 1/2 way through the dough) then prick each corner once to 'let the fairies out'. Put it in the oven.

6. Cook for 25-30 minutes (every oven is a bit different). To check it’s done turn it over and tap the bottom, which should sound hollow. You can also prod it with a skewer and check the skewer comes out clean, or use a food thermometer and check it's above 92 degrees. Leave it to cool on a wire rack for 30 minutes then tuck in. I often just top mine with butter, but it goes especially well with smoked salmon and soups. You can toast any leftovers the next day.

Context

• While most breads rely on yeast to rise, soda bread relies on the bicarbonate of soda.

• Yeast and bicarbonate of soda both produce carbon dioxide gas, which essentially gets trapped in the glutinous flour dough, causing it to stretch and expand. The yeast needs time to produce this gas, which is why you let it prove, whereas the bicarb begins producing the CO2 as soon as it comes into contact with an acidic liquid. However, it will never reach the heights of a bread made with yeast so expect a more dense, crumbly bread.

• As mentioned, the bicarbonate of soda begins working when it comes into contact with any acidic liquid, which in this recipe is the buttermilk. Most people suggest getting the dough into the oven nice and quickly after you’ve mixed all the ingredients together, so the carbon dioxide isn’t allowed to escape into the atmosphere - which is also why you don’t knead the bread and should be fairly gentle with it. You knead bread to improve the gluten formation - gluten is the protein in wheat - but soda bread doesn’t require extensive gluten development for its structure, and kneading it will only release the CO2 and cause the dough to become tough and chewy.

• What’s the difference between bicarbonate of soda, baking soda, and baking powder? Turns out bicarbonate of soda and baking soda are the same thing, and then baking powder is bicarbonate of soda with acidic ingredients already mixed in, so all you have to do is add liquid or heat to begin the reaction. They can’t quite be used interchangeably though, so do use the right one.

• The reason I’ve suggested wholemeal spelt flour, instead of just wholemeal flour (which will actually rise better than spelt), is that 'ancient grains' like spelt and rye are more easily digested than regular wholemeal, so this already fibrous recipe should be easier on your belly. Feel free to swap in regular wholemeal flour instead, but best not to use strong bread flour - strong flour is for recipes requiring a strong gluten network, as it has a higher protein/gluten content than regular flour, and as previously mentioned you don’t want or need that for soda bread.

• Why have I used some plain flour instead of making it all wholemeal? Because wholemeal flour on its own can make soda breads too dense - wholemeal flour is made from the entire wheat grain, so contains bran and germ, which act like tiny razor blades that shred the gluten strands making the dough less elastic, harder to work and means that it won't rise as well. The plain flour is there to counteract all this.

• If you're looking to add one more ingredient for a simple twist, throw a big handful of mixed fruit into the mixing bowl (those bags of raisins and sultanas etc that you get). The sweetness helps mellow the wholemeal taste, and some Irish people might now call this more of a wheaten bread, instead of a brown soda bread, but I refuse to get dragged into this bread sectarianism.