The Kracie Happy kitchen powdered hamburger from Japan

Posted on 11 May 2012 by Oliver Thring

The packet came, with its unmistakeably Japanese garishness, its jarring colours, fonts, slashes and squiggles. Inside it lay the Kracie Happy Kitchen powdered hamburger meal: a new and unsettling miniature. Six foil sachets filled with powders, some plastic cutlery and plastic tubs. You open the box, slice along dotted lines, cut out the plastic tubs, get some water, mix the powders separately, spread stuff, microwave stuff, and gradually assemble a fast food lunch, or what such a lunch might look like if it was designed by an alien working to a five-year-old’s drawing of a Happy Meal.

I was in Japan recently for the first time, and experienced one the most refined and elegant cuisines in the world. But much of it isn’t half strange. This is the country where someone – or, more likely, a group of people – decided that the best image with which to decorate a packet of Doritos was two men in wetsuits kicking each other in the balls.

This is the land of tinned bread, 80 different KitKat flavours, octopus ball crisps, candied squid on sticks, food that moves, and cuboid watermelons.

There’s a lot of rote and ritual around food, and there’s a love of small things – tiny fish eggs, little bowls of ozony sea-stuff. People obsess over presentation. And you can see these aspects in the powdered hamburger. Assembling it took me the best part of an hour. I couldn’t read the instructions, so I copied a YouTube video.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Why venison is the perfect meat

Posted on 9 May 2012 by Oliver Thring

Venison. Photograph: Alamy

A piece for The Guardian’s Comment is Free on the rise in venison sales across the UK

The British have finally embraced venison. Sales of the meat have risen by 50% in Sainsbury’s compared with last year, while Marks & Spencer sold three times as much in 2011 as it did in 2010. Total UK sales have more than doubled in the past five years, as British consumers haveshown a preference for more unusual meats and more game.

As a meat, venison has a lot going for it. Its ferrous, gamey flavour is far more interesting than flabby pork or cheap chicken. Gram for gram, it contains less fat than a skinless chicken breast. It has the highest protein and the lowest cholesterol content of any major meat. It’s thoroughly sustainable and always free-range. Why, then, has it taken so long to become popular?

A clue lies in the name: the word “venison” comes from the Latin verb for hunting: venare. For centuries, venison was restricted to the wild meat that landowning families sourced on their estates. The Normans and the Plantagenets demarcated much of England into royal forests, preventing farming on those lands in order to promote the growth of deer, wild boar and specific birds they enjoyed hunting. It thus became almost impossible for ordinary Britons to eat any venison unless they poached it, and the penalties for that were severe.

This entrenched a perception that venison was intrinsically high-end or “posh”, the effects of which linger to this day. It isn’t helped by the fact that a deer – perhaps especially the majestic red deer of the Scottish Highlands – is an exceptionally handsome creature, in a Landseerish sort of way. When Country Life magazine launched a campaign in 2008 for the UK to eat more venison, it knew it would have to brook fierce opposition from a public inclined to sympathise with good-looking mammals.

Continue reading at The Guardian

Softly softly: marshmallows are being reinvented by a new generation of confectioners

Posted on 5 May 2012 by Oliver Thring

A piece for the Independent on the new trend for high-end marshmallows

Sweet foods, all comforting, soft and pappy, have proved popular in this recession. Over the past few years we’ve seen revivals or rediscoveries of cupcakes, whoopie pies, syrups and bacon jams, of posh ice creams and doughnuts, the American-style pairings of pig and sugar. Mouth-coating sweetnesses that help people stave off fears of the debtors’ yard. Now it seems to be marshmallows’ turn. Those lurid, chemical, factory extrusions are suddenly all-natural, imbued with fresh fruit, natural flavourings, authentic fillings and sweet gourmet prejudice.

How to account for this? Marshmallows represent a Proustian jolt back to childhood: to campfires, sweetie jars, the Ghostbusters films, fairgrounds and the Sunday cinema pick ‘n’ mix. Their tongue-coating squidginess is deeply reassuring. So it was perhaps inevitable that marshmallows would make a comeback. What is surprising is the speed with which they’ve done so.

The ‘gourmet’ marshmallow trend seems to have started in Vancouver, where an outfit called Butter Baked Goods began to produce high-end examples as early as 2009 – they now flog them across North America. All of a sudden marshmallow shops, or sweet shops or bakeries specialising in marshmallows, have been opening across the US. The New York Times says marshmallows are “having a moment in retro-land”. They “are the new cupcakes,” claims a co-owner of the Three Tarts Bakery in Manhattan, where fancy marshmallows go for roughly $1 apiece, in flavours such as mango, passion fruit and strawberry-basil.

Rural Americans are also catered for, with mail-order marshmallow companies experiencing a surge in sales. One such is called Sugar Poofs – not a name that translates particularly well – but the flavours are bold and inspired: lavender and vanilla, banana curry, and a white Russian, including coffee liqueur and Irish cream.

Guest post: Best London food markets

Posted on 3 May 2012 by Oliver Thring

Columbia Road flower market

This is a guest post, for which I accepted a fee

“London is a cultural hub, home to art galleries, festivals, theatres and amazing food markets. From spicy curries in Brick Lane to bakeries in Greenwich, London offers a whole variety of cuisine. In addition, buying products from a market means that you are supporting your local community and having the chance to enjoy authentic, fresh cuisine.

If you are like me and you love travelling, exploring and trying new foods, then you might be interested in finding out about some great food stalls around London. On the weekends, I much prefer to explore the city with my friends – where I often stumble across new places, pop into cafés and try the local food – compared to just staying indoors and playing partypoker with a takeaway pizza by myself. The great thing about food markets is that the produce is fresh and you can see your meal being made right before your eyes. It’s wonderful to walk around a market, look at all the huge pots of food cooking and smelling the different aromas of various cuisines.

Brick Lane is known for its curries and its bustling, vibrant market. In the summer, the cobbled streets become busy with tourists who are eager to try out some of the authentic Indian cuisine, while others admire the colourful scarves and jewellery on sale. Not only is Brick Lane a great place to pick up a fresh curry, but there are plenty of vintage clothes shops and music stores to explore. Brick Lane is also known for its bagels. Two very popular cafés sell huge bagels very cheaply and stuff them with salt beef and mustard.

Another great place to pick up food is Greenwich market which is home to a whole variety of food stalls. Greenwich market is a much more up-market place than Brick Lane; the prices are higher but the quality of the food is exquisite. You can choose from many worldwide cuisines, from sushi and German sausages, to jerk chicken curries and Italian olives and breads.”

Cooking with cannabis

Posted on 1 May 2012 by Oliver Thring

A couple of brownies that may or may not contain 'special seasoning'

The pretty town of Ashland in southern Oregon puffed its way into the news this week, when a restaurant opened there specialising in a particular kind of baking. The legal position of the cannabis cuisine which the restaurant serves is rather sketchy. Oregon, like 15 other states and Washington DC, permits marijuana use for medical purposes. (Similar legislation is pending in a dozen further states.) Local cops say that the totally unhippyish-sounding Earth Dragon Edibles is breaking the law, but news reports say the restaurant opened “without a hitch”. Apparently sober customers – or “patients”, as they must be known – all seemed keen. One of them, an ex-law enforcement official with a lovely white beard and a tie-dye T-shirt, said: “I’ve seen the bad sides and the good sides [to marijuana], and for 30 years I’ve been disabled and it saved my life so far.” Which is heartening.

I should have predicted what a gargantuan quantity of lore and expertise surrounds cooking with marijuana. My own involvement is limited to a rainily predictable afternoon as a student, resulting in a tray of mulchy, green-flecked brownies. They tasted as if a rodent had died on a compost heap, but nonetheless exposed a previously unseen hilarity in Richard and Judy’s You Say We Pay. (Adam Buxton recognised almost the same thing a couple of years later.)

Inevitably, it turns out we did it all wrong. The psychoactive components of cannabis are best released in warm fat or alcohol: connoisseurs apparently make a kind of butter using the leaves and stems of the plant, or steep them in rum or brandy to produce a liqueur bearing the neat if tautological name of crème de gras.

Cooking with weed has a long and not ignoble tradition. Mixed with ground almonds, milk and sugar into a drink happily called bhang, it’s used in religious rites across much of northern India. Chinese cannabis recipes go back to the 7th century BC, and Bartolomeo Platina included a recipe for “a health drink of cannabis nectar” in the world’s first printed cookbook, De Honesta Voluptate Et Valetudine (“On Honourable Pleasure and Health”), published in 1475.

The brownie is arguably the most famous recipe for weed thanks to Alice B Toklas, who published a 1954 cookbook full of anecdotes about the famous people she had known, particularly Gertrude Stein. (Stein in fact wrote Toklas’s 1933 “autobiography”, which in itself sounds like a fairly stoned thing to do.) The Alice B Toklas Cook Book included a recipe for “Haschisch Fudge”: readers were assured this was “the food of Paradise … it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR“. Indeed it might.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Kebab Kitchen: a new London street food project

Posted on 25 April 2012 by Oliver Thring

Time to tell you about something that’s been gestating for a while. I’m setting up a street food venture with James Ramsden called Kebab Kitchen. We’re going to be selling beautiful unminced doners using free-range meat (Suffolk chicken, West Country lamb), hot lavash bread, smoked garlic buffalo yoghurt sauce, red cabbage lightly pickled in pomegranate molasses, onions with sumac and lemon zest, fat roasted chillies, searing hot sauce, crunchy cucumber and tomato sprinkled with nigella (not Nigella) … that kind of thing.

James and I spent a couple of cold, rainy, raki-soaked weeks travelling round Turkey plundering ideas and methods for the ‘babs. In Gaziantep by the Syrian border we found a recipe for the most stunning, bright-red marinade; in Istanbul we pulled sizzling wood-roasted lamb off skewers with our teeth; near Izmir we found the perfect roasted chilli. Without making any bold claims of authenticity – we’re only ‘Eastern-ish’ – it’s all gone into this project.

We’re a mobile outfit – stalls and markets and so on; we’re on the lookout for the right permanent pitch but are itinerant for the time being. We’re launching this Friday at The StockMKT in Bermondsey Square – 10 minutes from London Bridge. Other events are planned over the summer, and we have some private parties booked.

It’s been tremendous fun setting this up – even the headachey bits like hygiene certificates, HMRC forms, health and safety courses, meetings with accountants, business plans and spreadsheets. We’re still working out how it’s all going to run. But we hope you’ll come down and join us for a proper British kebab.

All eyes on the pies

Posted on 25 April 2012 by Oliver Thring

Stargazy pie

It’s the British Pie Awards today, in Melton Mowbray of course, where a vast panel of judges will masticate their way through 18 categories of stuffed pastries. As well as predictable pork, banal beef and stalwart steak and kidney, there are classes for “football”, fish, “celebration” and “other meat”, which offer more to the imagination.

The event takes place in a church hall bedecked with bunting; the logo has a union flag emblazoned athwart a handsome pie. It’s touching and quaint, this English obsession with name-tags and rosettes for everyday stuff: white coats and serious, critical faces staring at a table of marrows.

We’ve loved pies for a long time in this country. Alan Davidson thoughtthe word might be a contraction of “magpie”: those birds collect a variety of things, and pies once contained a variety of ingredients.

The pies we have today, with their edible pastries and crinkled crusts, are probably indigenous. But until the 1600s, when people really started to systematise cookbook-writing, hardly anyone bothered to mention how pastry was made or what you did with it. We know that some cooks would get a lump of rye flour, mix it with hot water into a greyish putty, then punch this with their fists and raise the edges of the pie around the flattened bit. The meat – more usually, meats – would then be baked inside it, with water and flavourings. Once it was cooked, you’d drain off the gravy and fill the pie with clarified butter: it would keep for weeks or months in the larder. When you wanted to eat it, you’d make a fresh gravy, heat the pie up and discard the inedible pastry.

One of the loveliest things about pies is their universal appeal. From the start, everyone from the king down enjoyed them. At Hampton Court, the largest oven in the pastry house was 12ft wide and baked pies containing entire venison. Everyone else’s pies contained a mishmash of meats or whatever birds they’d managed to snare. Dorothy Hartley includes a recipe for rook pie in her overrated and turgid tome Food in England. Most rook meat is “bitter and black,” she says: you boil the breasts only in water and milk, put them on top of a steak, “weave bacon into a lattice over the birds”, cover everything in pastry then bake it. “Serve with mustard,” she enjoins (presumably before brisk vomiting).

Continue reading at the Guardian

Me and my spoon

Posted on 20 April 2012 by Oliver Thring

Spoons made from different metals

A piece for the Guardian on a singularly bonkers dinner I recently attended

Has anything amusing ever happened to you in connection with a spoon? When Private Eye asks the question, the answer is usually no: the Me and My Spoon column features spoons because spoons aren’t especially interesting. Or weren’t until now. The other day I went to a dinner about spoons. Or, more specifically, on what spoons are made of, which would be a good name for an inspirational movie about spoons. It was at the Indian restaurant Quilon, and the idea was to see whether using different metals in cutlery affected the taste of food.

They sat us down in front of seven shiny spoons: copper, gold, silver, tin, zinc, chrome and stainless steel. We were about 12: Harold McGeelooking owlish, Heston Blumenthal with his arm in a sling, some academics, journalists and PRs. The dinner was organised by something called The Institute of Making, which sounds like a university for toddlersbut is in fact “a multidisciplinary research club for those interested in the made world”. “Artist and maker” Zoe Laughlin, one of its founders, was there. Her website, asifitwerereal.org, includes “a selection of biographies” variously written by “a friend”, “a parent”, “a sibling”, “a stranger” (someone she met on the Tube) and “a pet” (“Zoe has no pets,” we’re told).

In front of me was a booklet with background research. “In this project,” it informed, “we asked ourselves how do these materials taste, do they affect the taste of food, and is it possible to understand, and thus design, the affect (sic) they have?” Overleaf was a series of tasting notes on spoons. Copper, I read with a creeping sense of terror, is “found to slightly inhibit saltiness”, silver has “a slight bitterness”, zinc carries an “earthly, dry, rasping tendency” while poor old stainless steel was prosaically glossed as “familiar”.

The food at Quilon is deliciously spiced and complex: it was impossible to focus on the spoons. To me, these varied only in their metal-ness – copper tasted more metallic than stainless steel, which tasted more metallic than gold. As far as I could tell, this was more or less it. But around me cooed a table in raptures at different “flavours” in the metals. “I dare you to try the copper spoon with the grapefruit!” challenged a dauntless soul. “Check out the taste profile of silver with beer foam!” raved another. Even Blumenthal, who looked thoroughly baffled by proceedings, gamely chipped in by observing “there’s a bitterness to the zinc”.

Continue reading at the Guardian

The man who eats live animals

Posted on 17 April 2012 by Oliver Thring

Food for Louis: eating eyeballs, raw heart, a live scorpion and a frog. Photographs: YouTube

A piece for the Guardian on Louis Cole, who eats strange things

A YouTube channel called Food for Louis reached 1m hits on one of its videos last week. Louis Cole is a shaggy-haired 28-year-old living in Roehampton, south west London. Since he started posting videos last May, Cole has filmed himself eating, among other things, 21 live locusts, a raw bull’s heart, a turkey leg crawling with maggots (the “Christmas special”, that one), a rotting dead frog , a “mouseshake” (10 dead mice blitzed in a blender), a large, live lizard from the Brazilian jungle, a live tarantula, live crayfish, live scorpion and, most controversially to judge by the “dislikes” and comments, “my pet goldfish”.

After the bush tucker trials of I’m a Celebrity, Bourdain with his balut,Bear Grylls and Fear Factor, the British public is now familiar with this kind of stunt eating. But Cole takes things rather further. I don’t know which is worse: the dead lizard spasming as it pokes out of his mouth, the way he grips four tarantula legs in each hand before biting the creature’s head off, the crayfish pinching his tongue, or the money shot of the mashed-up scorpion, disconcertingly resembling beef stroganoff. No, I do know which is the worst: the ragworms. Cole manages three of these, each a little under a foot long. They bite him back when he puts them in his mouth. As he delivers the coup de grace and begins to crunch, his gag reflex is so strong that a half-chewed ragworm corpse splatters out of his mouth. Undeterred, he slurps it back in like a ribbon of fettuccine.

If it all sounds idiotic, pointless and embarrassingly laddish, the most surprising thing about Cole is that he doesn’t talk or act like an extra from Jackass. He’s softly-spoken and rather unassuming in person. Before he started earning what he tells me is “enough to survive on” making his YouTube videos, he spent five years as a community worker helping to run an organisation that sought to protect inner city children from gangs. He has taken troubled youths to countries such as Zambia, and says it was terrible when one London council ended its association with him after it became aware of his YouTube channel.

Cole started eating strange things for dares a few years ago. “My mates would get me to eat a spider,” he says. “I never had any problem with it.” He began with the easy stuff – a wasp, a rotten apple – before graduating to more challenging delicacies.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Reviewing the Pizza Hut hot dog stuffed crust

Posted on 13 April 2012 by Oliver Thring

The Pizza Hut hot dog stuffed crust: 'delicious'. Photograph: Pizza Hut

A potentially career-ending piece for the Guardian on Pizza Hut’s hot dog stuffed crust

Those Americans who think of Britain as a backward food desert are this week eating their words. For we are the first to experience Pizza Hut’s latest wheeze, the “hot dog stuffed crust” – a sausage coddled in the crust of a large pizza. (Don’t all start hieing ye to your nearest branches just yet: it’s delivery only at the moment.) The Sun understatedly calls this creation “the stuff of dreams”. Fox News and the LA Times deem us “lucky” to be so honoured. No less an organ than Time magazine hails a “caloric coma”, and in an existential cri de coeur, laments that Britain is “one step ahead in the heart-attack-in-a-box department”. How, it wonders, can America “redeem its title as most unhealthy country … Come on Paula Deen, where are you when we need you the most?”

It was Pizza Hut, you may remember, who unleashed the stuffed crust on to a peaceful world in the distant 1990s. They got that discriminating gastronome Donald Trump to flog it; Trumpy barked that we had to eat the slices “crust first”. (A Brooklyn family who owned a patent for crust-stuffing sued Pizza Hut for $1bn at the time; they lost the lawsuit in 1999 (pdf).) You’d have thought that mucking around once with crusts would be enough for these people. But no. “The new range,” gushes a spokesman, “builds on our proud tradition of creating innovative dishes to enjoy on a night in with friends.”

I hadn’t eaten a Pizza Hut in around a decade, since I worked in one during the school holidays. I remembered frozen discs of dough which we sprayed with a canister of “developer” so that they rose like boils in the pans. I remembered lumps of beef and pork distinguished by different shades of brown. I remembered sloppy tinned pineapple and anchovies that smelled of infection. Hopes were low.

Continue reading at The Guardian