Good afternoon Morsels has arrived. This is the sixth newsletter arriving in your inbox and the first of a series that will look to offer recipes for items I recommend should always be in your kitchen, aptly titled ‘Kitchen Staples,’ or if you like you can call them ‘Cooking Cheats.’
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It’s a beautiful thing when you make something that you would happily eat every day for the rest of your life. That moment when you taste something that is both equally familiar and entirely exotic. It’s an intoxicating feeling. There is a certain comfort attached to it that I personally seek when I develop or explore recipes. The recipes below are two recipes (for me) of this ilk. The flavour of the chilli jam was something I first experienced in 2012 in Northern Italy when an old friend (who was also a humble and incredibly talented chef from Thailand) used something similar to dry roast fish in a wok. I had never tasted anything like it and at the time (instead of asking) assumed it was made off the back of smoked nuts and burnt tomato. I could not have been more wrong. When I first made this chilli jam in 2018 I realised how wrong I was and how stupid I was to not ask for the recipe at the time. 6 years in adulthood without it was far too long. It has been in constant supply in my fridge since. Make it. It is simpler than you might imagine.
The date paste is a recipe that was passed onto me by my old Head Chef, Julz. Julz had a capacity to take ingredients in their simplest form and make something remarkably complex by cooking them in a way he described as giving them ‘a warm hug.’ Patience is required, yes, however the payoff is wonderful. The kind of recipe you keep close so that you can gift everyone at Christmas a jar year after year.
Cooking Cheats: Pastes and Sauces
You cant get around it. A good sauce or a good paste can make or break a dish. In fact, it can make or break a chef. A well executed romesco, a tantalising ketchup, a chutney for all seasons; if you have these things on a menu in a restaurant it can be the difference between very good and mediocre. If you have them in your fridge at home… it makes everything easier. Everything is enhanced with the slight addition of a good paste or a perfectly1 executed sauce. Toast, rice, crisps, cheese, pasta, chickpeas, steak, chicken, or fish, whatever it is you are eating can be enhanced.
It’s the one thing I remember thinking when I first read Skye Gyngell’s cookbook A Year in My Kitchen - published in 2010 while she was at the helm of the kitchen in Petersham Nurseries, one year before it was awarded it’s first Michelin star2 (which she then promptly rejected) - sauces and pastes seemed to play such an important role in her simple, elegant form of European cooking. Romesco (pg. 67), chilli jam (pg. 84), basil oil (pg. 42), horseradish cream (pg. 76) harissa (pg. 179), and pickled pear paste (pg. 150), all sat with great esteem atop fish, lamb or green beans. These pastes brought the food to life, gave it everything it was lacking and made it worthy of the recognition it received. The addition of this extra element can add texture, acidity or fat. Often it becomes the missing element in a dish. The deft touch on a plate that feels like it’s constantly missing that simple ‘something.’ A dish of chickpeas can be utterly unremarkable until it finds itself with the addition of romesco. A thick scoop or goats curd and fried chicken skin biscuits is almost offensively rich until you pair it with an acidic and fragrant salsa verde. Chicken adequately3 fried can be dull and lifeless until paired with a game changing chilli jam.
Reading Skye’s book in retrospect it’s the sauces and pastes that really stand out as setting her food apart at the time. Her instinct for flavour and texture wasn’t really matched at that level. Neither (unfashionably so at the time), was her craving for provenance of ingredients. My time working at the Nurseries busted some big myths about where the ingredients came from4 and I was saddened that it didn’t live up to the romance I had come to imagine Petersham existed within at the time. Skye was, however, one of the first chefs with an international brand to promote seasonality and sustainability in her cooking, and considered in her writing how people might be able to translate that in their homes. Not only did her recipes allow me as a home cook to wow people with cooking prowess and subtle technique but beyond that she offered an education in how to do simple things very well. As a lout without any chops in the kitchen, the brilliance of those initial recipes (and the words she used to give them life) was inspiring and affirming5.
Sauces and pastes have come to play a big part in the way in which I like to cook. Don’t misunderstand the reason for that (or if you choose to, do). I am not using them in my cooking to hide deficiencies or to cover up a poorly executed dish or shitty ingredients. No. They are used instead as individual life-giving ingredients in a dish. Ingredients that are able to provide top notes in flavour against the other ingredients. They complete and round out a plate a food in a way that is otherwise hard to describe, in even the simplest of dishes: rice with a chilli jam and some eggs (at times an unbeatable dinner); eggs on toast with a beetroot ketchup; a cold lamb sandwich with a horseradish cream6; or white anchovies on toast with romesco. All are simple and beautiful and refined but only ever memorable for how the sauce or paste brings it all together to make it whole.
Below you will find two of my favourite things to have in the fridge. I think they are real go getters. They last forever in a container and don’t ever let you down, however you apply them. Both of the recipes are fundamentally straightforward. All they require is a little bit of planning.
Read on to see the recipes for my favourite chilli jam and date paste.
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Chilli Jam
There is always room in the fridge for a jam that can be eaten on everything. Fish, steak, noodles, rice, eggs, vegetables. It is very important to have a strong stock of this at all times. If you are worried about making too much, buy some jars and give it to friends, they will want to know immediately how you made it. Tell them.
Ingredients:
2 cup veg oil
250gr peeled and halved garlic cloves
200gr shallots chopped
12 dried chillies, stemmed seeded and cut into 1 inch segments
80gr coconut or palm sugar
1 tbsp shrimp paste (or miso)
8gr salt
2 tbsp fish sauce (or light soy sauce)
80gr tamarind water (tbsp of tamarind paste / 40gr water or to taste)
Method:
In a wok or deep pot heat the oil until it begins to shimmer.
Add the garlic and cook until light brown (20-30sec), remove and set aside.
Add the onions to until light brown. Remove and set aside.
Add the chillies but just until puffed up (10-15 seconds), remove and set aside.
N.b - Do not burn the chillies, if you do you will need to stat again with the oil as it will be tarnished with burnt chilli bitterness.
Meanwhile, in a small saucepan combine the sugar and the water over medium heat, until dissolved the sugar has dissolved. Set aside.
Now, in a food processor pulse chillies until they have broken up.
Add the garlic, the shallots, the shrimp paste (or miso), and pulse with the chillies.
Pulse the ingredients until they form a rough paste with a texture you are happy with.
Transfer the ingredients out of the food processor and into a large bowl.
Using a spoon or a spatula, stir in the sugar syrup, the tamarind water & 1/4 cup frying oil.
Stir until combined, all of the liquid will be absorbed by the jam.
Allow it to cool and put it into a sealed container in the fridge. This will last at least a month. I have had a batch that lasted six months (well, that I continued to eat for six months).
You will eat this on everything. Absolutely everything.
—
Date Paste
It is essential to have a date paste (or chutney) in the fridge for cheese. Fucking fantastic with curry or even just to have with butter on toast. Make it. It’s so straight forward. The payoff is worth it.
Ingredients:
100gr brown onion
100gr raisins
500gr pitted dates
1 cup (250ml) cider vinegar
50gr brown sugar
100ml apple juice
1 tsp (4gr) garamasala
1/2 tsp (2gr) ground ginger
1 cinnamon stick
Method:
Put all of the ingredients into a wide non stick pan with high edges, adding the sugar as a sprinkle over the top last.
Stirring, mix together and reduce over a low to medium heat, making sure not nothing sticks to the base and burns.
As the dates soften, crush them with your spoon so that they are in small chunks.
Once the liquid has been reduced by 3/4, reduce the heat and reduce the liquid by half again. It will absorb into the dates to form the base of the paste.
Remove from the heat, the cooking is done.
Allow to cool.
Taste and then season to your taste with a pinch of salt.
This will, over time cook down into a beautiful, thick, savoury yet sweet date paste.
Eat this always.
FOOTNOTES
When I use the word perfect I don’t use it in the sense that something is either perfect or entirely imperfect. There is no right or wrong when describing the perfect way to cook something for your own palate and for your home. No one can tell you that something you have made that you think is perfect is not perfect. Sauces and pastes can take many different forms and textures and result in so many different outcomes even when using the same techniques over and over again. Seasonality, produce, temperature, how you are feeling when it’s made; it can all have a huge impact on the final result. However each can be perfect in it’s own way.
Skye left Petersham Nurseries not long after this time. She had been running the kitchen at Petersham since 2004 when it was just a shed and a tap outside next to an oven and some portable cookers. She had, in a relatively small amount of time turned it into one of the most sought after reservations in London. Her food afforded the Nurseries the transformation it undertook into the breathtaking space it was at that time. Her light hand on food along with her vision for it’s aesthetic positioned Petersham as the last vestige of the bohemian riche. I went to work at Petersham in 2012 when I finished studying at the University of Gastronomic Science in Pollenzo. Skye had left. Greg Malouf was running the kitchen and for the consecutive year was also awarded a Michelin star. Justifiably so. His take on modern Middle Eastern is superb, his dishes seemed to me, at the time, to be almost Royal. Greg, if I recall correctly, had already abandoned the Nurseries by the time he received the Michelin star. It was not retained for a third year and while this year past they were awarded a ‘Green’ star, we all know that is entirely meaningless, however it’s meaninglessness requires an article in and of itself to explore.
Even adequately fried chicken, when dull, is very good. Imagine if it always had a spicy chilli jam friend. Just imagine.
In her books A Year in My Kitchen (2010), My Favourite Ingredients (2008), & How I Cook (2010) Skye alludes the bounty of the Garden at Petersham as if it were filling the fridges and finishing the plates throughout he restaurant. It was not. No, not at all. I was sad to see this. However, she did use the best ingredients she could get her hands on from the best suppliers that were available to her at the time. Currently she works directly from farm to table and has been a pioneer of zero plastic kitchens in the UK alongside the promotion of other sustainable kitchen and cooking practices.
In truth though, the most affirming thing I read in her books and to which I credit the continuation and pursuit of cooking in my life is a line at the beginning of one of Skye’s books in which she described the greatest asset for a young chef; not knife skills or an understanding of technique but instead, (to paraphrase) ‘the excitement they feel at the appearance of the first white asparagus of the season.’ As a young thug who loved the thought of seasonality and shavings of white asparagus, I felt she was describing me. With that came this strange sense of belonging and reward for what had always been ridiculed and dismissed as a childish immaturity. My excitement, my joy over food even at it’s most basic level felt validated. And so, for this last ten years, in many ways I have Skye to thank.
The story goes that before Rose Grey (founder of River Cafe and really, the matriarch of British European cuisine) opened her first restaurant she was in London without much to do. She had been cooking privately for friends dinners but had no formal training. Keith McNally (founder of institutions in New York including Balthazar, Pastis, and Minetta Tavern) was on the hunt for a chef to run his kitchen at Nell’s in New York. He was introduced to Rose through a mutual friend in London. He arrived at her apartment for an informal interview. Rose offered Keith a snack as they talked and returned from the kitchen with a cold lamb sandwich with horseradish cream. Rose had no formal cooking experience, had never worked in a kitchen professionally or led a team. Keith offered her the job of Head Chef on the spot. Rose returned from New York to open River Cafe and forever change the British restaurant world. The point you ask? A horseradish cream can turn an otherwise flat and lifeless sandwich (regardless of how good the lamb is) into a thing of great wonder and inspiration.
Words & recipes by Daniel Wilson
Daniel has a Masters in Food Culture from The University of Gastronomic Science in Pollenzo, Italy. He is a chef and recovering restauranteur.