Bread & yeast cookery

Chickpea Flatbread/Pancake

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Chickpea flour, also known as gram flour or besan, is a great ingredient, high in protein and fibre and gluten-free to boot!

I guess that, in the UK, it’s best known for being the flour you make onion bhaji with, but it features around the Mediterranean in a variety of flatbread-type recipes and is also made into fried chip-like snacks. They go by various names: socca, farinata, kalinta and panisse, to name a few.

This simple flatbread has just two main ingredients: gram flour and water. I add salt, pepper and nigella seeds on this occasion. I often add herbs and/or spring onion/scallion.

They’re a flatbread to use straight away; if left in the fridge, they’ll crack when rolled. When they’re like that, I eat them with toppings or with dips just spooned on.

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Burgers, Fresh Chicken Sausage

Fried Chicken Sausage & Burger

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I have a deep and abiding love for fried chicken.  My wife, on the other hand, does not love that I love fried chicken! 

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Read how I solve this dilemma – recipe and method included…
Bacon, Curing Calculator

Bacon Medallions

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My vascular consultant, Mr Murphy, has suggested that I don’t have too much of the fatty stuff, in particular saturated fat.

Even though pork fat is high in monounsaturated fat and oleic acid, which are the fats that are good for you in olive oil, I still need to reduce it. Hence, I’m removing all the tasty bits off a loin of pork to just leave the eye!

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Buying this ready-made, if you don’t want 10% added water, is expensive. Sainsbury’s charges £21.88/kg for dry-cured. Whereas pork loin’s about £7/kg and the cure costs pennies.

Make the bacon…
Cooked Sausage

Garlic Ham Luncheon Meat

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Luncheon meat is one of the best illustrations of the British relationship with food; call something Luncheon Meat, and it’s sold as a product in the supermarket’s budget range at £4 a kilo; call it Jagdwurst, Stuttgarter, Schinkenwurst or Mortadella, and it costs five times as much!

We just don’t value our own British products. Admittedly, the budget Luncheon Meat has a little less actual meat than its fancy-named counterparts, but this doesn’t have to be so. If it were held in higher esteem and commanded a higher price like its continental counterparts, this could be changed.

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This luncheon meat is not an easy project; it has quite a few stages. You’ll need a mincer/grinder, sausage stuffer, and a fairly robust food processor. You also need scales that measure in grams.

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Cooked Cured Pork

Tasso Ham

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Tasso ham is a seasoning ingredient in Cajun cooking. It can be used in gumbo, red beans and rice, jambalaya, etouffee and cooked greens. It is cured, smoked, and heavily seasoned with paprika, garlic and cayenne. A little goes a long way.

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Though called ham, it is made from the pork shoulder rather than the leg.

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Snack Sticks

Tajin-Chipotle Snack Stick

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I originally made this with lime juice powder, which is lime juice sprayed onto maltodextrin, and which is hard to find.

I came across a product called Tajin (and there are others on the market) which is a combination of lime juice powder and chilies. It is sprinkled on fresh fruit to enhance the flavor.

To give the snack stick some heat, I added chipotle chili powder.

Make the sticks…
Calculators, Fresh Pork Sausage

Toulouse Sausage

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I wrote this back in 2012. I’ve amended that post to reflect the changes I’ve made along the way:

Making Toulouse Sausage, like most things related to curing and sausage-making, is fairly simple, or should be. After all, we all know that a Toulouse sausage is a pork and bacon sausage made with wine and garlic. That’s what the supermarket’s sell to us and they can’t be wrong…

…or can they? Well, many people think they are, including Gascon charcutier Dominique Chapolard, source of many of the recipes featured at the ‘Kitchen at Camont’ cookery school in SW France, who tells us that the ingredients are simply pork with salt and pepper – the simplest of sausages that relies on the quality of the meat that it’s made with.

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Baking - Savoury, Buffet, Pork Recipes, Snacks

Pork Pie

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They say that making a pork pie is a three-day process. This one’s taken two days. I made the pastry in the morning and formed the pie in the evening, then cooked the pie the following day.

This is the first time that I’ve used this method. I saw it on Instagram, posted by London butcher HG Walter.

It’s a work in progress, but as a first attempt, I’m very pleased with it. I’d go so far as to say that it’s the easiest method I’ve used to make a pie.

Click for the recipe and method…
Snack Sticks

Bread Spice Snack Sticks

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I first came across German bread spice in the Paderborn Rye bread recipe given in the excellent book “The Rye Baker” by Stanley Ginsberg.  It is a wildly aromatic blend of spices (and much more interesting than using just caraway).  When I smelled it after a spin in the spice gr, I knew it would work in a snack stick.  I decided to add some Butterkäse cheese from Germany via Aldi and reduced the fat to compensate.

Continue reading and get the recipe…
Information and annoucements

Stilton Cheese Week

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It’s Stilton cheese week from 10 October to 18 October 2026.

Back in 2010 I wrote:

“Blue Stilton, the ‘King of Cheese’, has a history that is so well-documented it is unneccesary to repeat it here, save to say that it now has the status of a ‘protected designation of origin’, which means that only cheese made in Leicestershire, Derbyshire or Nottinghamshire, to strictly enforced standards, can be called Stilton…”

“…There are only seven licensed Stilton producers in the world. Four in Leicestershire, 2 in Nottinghamshire and 1 in Derbyshire. Other than the Derbyshire dairy, they are all within about 20 miles of Melton Mowbray, of pork pie fame.”

Sadly, there are only four left now.

Continue reading Stilton Cheese Week →

Food, Curing and Sausage