Geekfood Mk2.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I do that when I can, but the sprog doesn't like flavour or texture

[Dr. kitteny berk]

This. Is. Awesome.

https://imgur.com/a/GsvrX

Seriously, look at that shit, it's an outstanding bundle of useful information.

[buzzmong]

I could have done with that as a student, and quite frankly, may print it and laminate it regardless.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I was thinking the same, looks like it'd go nicely in my folder of excessive utility.

[Dog Pants]

Comprehensive! I need this for when I'm trapped in the kitchen.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

So you can lash them together and use them as a rope?

[HereComesPete]

Silly merkin measurements!

[Dr. kitteny berk]

they get on my tits, but given the whole internet thing, I just tend to get on with it, even if volumetric measurements for compressible substances are fucking retarded.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Sunday science: Preheat cast iron pan in oven to FUCK ME THAT'S HOT, remove from oven, assemble pizza in pan, stick under grill set to 11 until toppings are sorry. then leave in pan until dough is cooked nicely.

Result: good pizza.

[Mr. Johnson]

Bacon-buckwheat pancakes

If you like pancakes and bacon, this is a lovely filling alternative to the regular pancake which is eaten mostly in Belgium and France.

Ingredients (for about four pancakes, adjust where necessary):

-300 gr buckwheat flour
-100 gr pastry flour
-6 decilitres milk (or buttermilk)
-2 decilitres blonde beer (something not too bitter, we use "table beer" which is sweet low alcoholic beer but I didn't have any so I used a Corsendonk Agnus)
-4 eggs
-4 slices of salted belly bacon, about 0,5 cm thick.
-Sirop de Liège, or alternative for spreading. (more on this below)
-butter
-Salt

Recipe:

-Mix the buckwheat flour, pastry flour*, milk, beer** and a pinch of salt in a large bowl and mix them together.
-Add the eggs and mix the whole thing with an immersion blender until your batter is smooth and without lumps.
-Heat up your pan on medium heat and melt a bit of butter.
-Cook your bacon until it's crispy on both sides, try not to burn the fat***.
-If your fat isn't burned pour it into something and set it aside for baking the pancakes in.
-Wipe out you pan and pour some of the fat in, when it's hot enough (medium heat) pour in about three ladlefulls of pancake batter, you need a pretty thick pancake so the bacon stays in.
-put your bacon on top of the pancake and bake for a minute or two, then flip it over carefully (they're brittle) and bake it about a minute on that side.
-Serve and smear some sirop de Liège on top, the mix of slightly sour and syrupy sweet taste goes fantastic with the pretty bland buckwheat and salty bacon. I can imagine it's probably not very common in the British isles but health stores might have it or something like it and if all else fails maple or other syrup will probably also work.

If you have bacon-less pancakes left over they can be enjoyed with other savoury or sweet things.

Enjoy!


*Hint for Fab: The pastry flour is to prevent your buckwheat pancakes from breaking apart too much when you bake them, if you're gluten intolerant you'll have to swap it out with something else to bind it better, buckwheat is a seed so there's no gluten in there.

**Can be swapped out with water.

***If you did burn it, just use butter.

[fabyak]

Awesome! Nice one Mr J and thanks for the GF flag

[Dr. kitteny berk]

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2514 ... wine-sauce

this is really very good.

[tandino]

This. Is. Awesome.

https://imgur.com/a/GsvrX

Seriously, look at that shit, it's an outstanding bundle of useful information.

excellent resource there Berkleton.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

So, apparently pasta (home made, in this case) bacon and mascarpone makes quite an acceptable food.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Following on from the sweet and sour sauce a few pages back, I think I've finally attained happiness, mostly using the power of thought (and the assumption that most chineses won't actually fuck about doing anything clever for 90% of food)

For: Sweet and sour (the type in sauce, not balls), lemon chicken, salt and pepper chicken, and just about anything else with that type of batter, crispy beef certainly uses the same, as I suspect will beef/moose/pork/prawn/goat/duck in sauces will too.

You need:
1 bushel cornflour (I'm sure other fine starch flours will work too)
Chicken tits cut into 6-8mm strips/slices (any thinner and it's like eating leather)
Shitload of oil in a flat bottomed wok wok/frying pan.

Do:
Make oil hot
Throw chicken strips in cornflour
Put cornfloury chicken tits in hot oil, one at a time so as to keep oil hot.
Cook until cooked.


Then:

Sweet and sour: Peel carrot, then make think slices using potato peeler, chop onion and peppers, throw veg into wok until softened, add sauce (from a few pages back) then add chicken and throw into a plastic tub.

Lemon chicken: Make sauce using fresh lemon juice, zest of lemons, something sugary, cornflour. nuke until right, assemble with sliced lemon in plastic tub.

Salt and pepper chicken: 1-3 chillies chopped fine, big pinch of salt (maldon please), slice 2-3 spring onions. Throw into wok with chicken bits, plastic tub.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I got some Vogue Tri-Wall Pans for my birthday.

Not massively spendy, fucking heavy and really very good, especially nice because they're not non stick, so you can build up a nice fond for sexy tasty sauces.

And no horribly tight corners like on cheap pans, so you can get a whisk/spoon in there.

[Dog Pants]

Mango and ginger Wensleydale. Holy shit that stuff is nice.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Pulled pork a'la this week

Stuff:

Pork (shoulder)
Ale (sharp's atlantic)
Wholegrain mustard
Soft dark brown sugar
Salt
Garlic granules
paprika
sriracha.

Rub mustard into pork.

Mix Sugar, salt, garlic paprika (we shall now call this dry rub)

Rub aforementioned dry rub into pork.

Throw pork into snuggly-sized saucepan

Add booze ( )until pan is full (WASTE NO MORE THAN ONE PINT) and a squirt of sriracha.

Apply to ~140c oven with a lid on for 6+ hours, remove lid at some point to reduce sauce and make bits of the piggy a bit crispy.

[Mr. Johnson]

Winter is approaching, so it's time to make a hearty Belgian winter dish. Or summer dish, it's not really defined by season. Anyway, let's make

VOL-AU-VENT (with fresh chicken broth)

Those of you that know their way around a kitchen might already know what a vol-au-vent is; it's a puff pastry used to serve aperitifs. In Belgium however, it's used to refer to the pastry and a dish normally served with the pastry. I'm going to make it with fresh chicken broth, but if you don't feel like going through the extra effort you can just use store bought chicken broth or stock and a whole roast chicken. If you do want to go the whole hog, buy a chicken that's meant for roasting (as opposed to one for making soup). Traditionally this is served with chips or mashed potatoes, but any potato product will do (bar crisps, you lunatic!).

This recipe is for four people, give or take.

Ingredients:

Broth:
-4 large carrots
-6 sticks of celery
-4 onions
-4 leeks
-3 l water
-15 peppercorns (roughly, can be more)
-2 cloves
-4 cloves of garlic
-bundle of thyme (dried or fresh)
-bundle of parsley
-2 twigs of fresh rosemary
-salt to taste (be careful!)
-1 whole chicken

Vol-au-vent
-The actual vol-au-vents (large ones if you can find them)
-250 g mixed minced meat (beef/pork)
-250 g mushrooms
-a clove of garlic
-60 g butter (I used 90 g)
-80 g flour (I used 110 g)
-1 egg
-1 and a half l chicken broth
-1 and a half dl cream
-1 lemon
-breadcrumbs
-pepper
-salt

And in case you can't find any vol-au-vent pastries in the shop,

-2 sheets of puff pastry
-egg yolk

You got all that stuff? Great! Let's begin, I'll show you how.


First, put on something more appropriate than a bathrobe.


That's better.

Fill the largest pot you have with 3 l of water and bring it to a boil. Make sure it is a very large pot or you could get in trouble later! Chop all your vegetables up coarsely and add them to the pot, close it off with the lid and let it simmer.


At this point, the world's saddest soup.

After leaving it to simmer for about 15 mins, add the chicken whole or in pieces. If you don't add the chicken you are now making vegetable broth, which is great but not what we need for this recipe.


Every tall person that tried to squeeze itself in a normal bathtub can relate to this chicken.

Leave all this to simmer gently for about an hour depending on the size of your chicken and on whether you chopped it up or not. Mine took about 2 hours. While you wait, go read your favourite book or build a shed, either is fine.Once you're sure your chicken is fully cooked through and all the vegetables have given off all their taste, remove the chicken from it's savoury bath and run your broth through a sieve into another pot. I did not use a sieve because my housemates are filthy arseholes and I had to resort to a colander. That also works but a sieve yields finer results. You can toss the vegetables away since they gave off all their flavour and you are a flavour vampire.


Turns out my pictures make a jaunty gif. Enjoy!


That's Leander the colander. Hi Leander!

Next, remove all the meat from your chicken and throw away the skin and bones, you don't need those. It should be pretty easy as the chicken has been cooked so long the meat just falls off the bone. Also, everything will be covered in grease now. It's everywhere.


Everywhere.


Artisanally reclaimed meat.

Then I sampled my broth and had a sandwich. It was a nice. Bob just had some lettuce.



Put aside 1 and a half litres of your broth or keep cooking it to strengthen the flavour, just make sure you have at least 1,5 l left. Congratulations! You've got chicken broth! That's a good thing.

Let's make some vol-au-vent, yo!

First, quarter all your mushrooms and crush your clove of garlic with the flat of your knife. Add some butter to a pan then add the garlic and the mushrooms. Cook them till done and set aside.


This one's for you, Pnut.

Next up, combine an egg with your mince and some breadcrumbs and roll your mixture into small bottle-cap sized balls. Cook these guys for a few minutes in your broth or bake them in a pan, either way make sure they're no longer raw inside.




"Ed Balls"

Now for the sauce. You start off by making your basic roux, melt your butter and whisk the flour through it till it start smelling of biscuits then add your broth bit by bit whilst you keep stirring with a whisk, and after the broth add the cream. After a while it should start thickening up, you want a runnier consistency than béchamel sauce but not too runny. If it's too runny and isn't getting thicker, get a different pot and make a smaller amount of roux and add your mixture. This happened to me and I used 30 of butter and 30 gr of flour extra.


You can almost smell the stink of my shame. Okay not really, it smelled delicious.

Now add the chicken, mushrooms and meatballs to your sauce and mix it all together. Leave it to warm everything up, add a little bit of lemon juice to give it some freshness and your sauce is done!


I have made you, sauce.

If you bought some pastries, simply follow the instructions on the packet or if you're making them yourself:

Pre-heat your oven to 180°C, roll out your puff pastry and cut out six large rings using a cookie cutter. In four of the six rings, cut out the middle with a smaller cutter. Now build up your pastry: Put a complete ring at the bottom, place the four rings on top and finish it with the last complete ring. Use a beaten egg yolk and a brush to glue them together and to give it a coating so it gets all nice and shiny. Put your pastries in the oven and bake for about 15-20 mins till they are fluffy and crispy.

To serve, cut out the middle part of the top of the pastry, pour in a healthy amount of the sauce and put the part you cut out on top. It's like a hat for your food!


Okay, that looks kinda gross. Let's get a better picture.


Let's just pretend this one's mine, okay?

Smakelijk!

[Grimmie]

Magical! Thanks Mr. J