Fuck the Tories
After the media sensation and critical acclaim of our ‘Celebration of Europe’ culinary road trip (‘A timely reminder of the beauty of cultural diversity’ – The Daily Mail), we thought we’d further defy the lockdown and travel the globe alphabetically in search of exotic treats and exciting flavours. Afghanistan seemed the obvious place to start as a, it starts with …
Saint Valentine visited Yumblog Villas on Sunday bearing Philosophy Football gifts, homemade cards and 650g of wet fish. All were welcome and put to good use. If you fancy cooking the delicious looking burger above/below, be forewarned this recipe requires around 3 hours put aside for salting and chilling … that said, it’s not as if you have people to …
These stuffed flatbreads are fairly substantial and so are traditionally simply served with yoghurt and/or chutney. However it had been a long and punishing trek up the Hindu Kush and by the time we made camp we were famished, so we ate ours accompanied by the braised aubergines below.
You’re very unlikely to have wholemeal self-raising flour unless, like us, you bought some by mistake. Worry not dear reader(s), the conventional white version will serve just as well.
What better accompaniment to the Sauerkraut and bean stew below than this cumin and salt encrusted bread. This recipe is taken from the approved specification for Belokranjska pogaca with the recognised designation traditional speciality by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food of the Republic of Slovenia of 28 October 2004 (324-25 / 01).
To be fair this ridiculously simple starter/bar snack may not be the best showcase for Lithuanian cuisine but apparently it’s a national institution and turns out to be very tasty to boot. Lithuania is a developed country with an advanced, high-income economy, a very high Human Development Index, a very high standard of living and favourable performance in metrics of …
Arguably an obvious choice. Undeniably a tasty one. There was mild panic when a trip to Sainsburys was met with an empty shelf where the Mozzarella should have been. Hopefully this was down to an oversight by the manager rather than a consequence of Brexit, but it is too dismal to speculate. On the fruitless walk back along London Road …
And so to our spiritual home, Germany. A country that seems to get most things right in the same way we don’t anymore. In 2018 on a visit to Berlin we saw Scritti Politti at an event called ‘Goodbye UK – and Thank You for the Music‘, a celebration paying ‘homage to the extraordinary musical creativity that made the United …
And what better to soak up your Lohikeitto than this robust (and novelty shaped) rye bread. Putkilahti, Finland
To go with our Škampi na buzaru we made these delicious flatbreads. Unlike many of their ilk, these are baked in the oven rather than cooked on a griddle and the resulting puffs of bread are most pleasing. It’s an easy bread to make, imagine the joy of filling them with lunchtime morsels, ham and slaw, cheese and pickle, houmous, …
Along with the pretzel pre-injected with butter, the Laugeneck has been one of the more innovative baked-goods finds from our many visits to the bakeries of Berlin. This triangle of loveliness is essentially a cunning hybrid of croissant and pretzel, taking the chewy butteriness of the former and encasing it in the salty crunch of the latter. Unusually for Yumblog, …
Take a shop bought pitta bread and make it lighter, fluffier, yeastier and generally breadier and you should get the general idea.
Obviously being the unbearable gastro-snobs that we are here at Yumblog Terrace we would never dream of buying a meal from anywhere as common or unrefined as a take away, Chinese or otherwise. So imagine our chagrin when travellers from the Orient told of a rare Eastern delicacy known as a Sesame Prawn Toast which, were we to satiate our …
… or an Italian version of a baguette. Not to be confused with the French Stick – the English version of the baguette which is 24 inches of pale bendy disappointment and about as authentic as Peckham Spring Water.
There are as many varieties of flat breads as there are varieties of Heinz products, or indeed bi-pedal humanoid aliens living amongst us – 57*. I can’t vouch for all of them, but this particular variant is tried, tested, easy to make, and very tasty. We laced ours with cumin although you could of course flavour yours with whatever spice …
Such is the toothsomeness of this pizza, it has now become a Friday evening regular here at Yumblog Cottage – along with six hasty after-work Stellas and a punch up* with rival food bloggers in the precinct. The recipe comes from the excellent ‘Polpo – A Venetian cookbook (of Sorts)‘ by Russell Norman. If you want a copy you can …
I like Paul Hollywood, I like beer and I like bread…
Pleasant surprise permeated through the Yumblog household when the first viewing of ‘Paul Hollywood’s Bread’ turned out to be a relatively straightforward cookery programme. There was of course the now obligatory 5 minute introduction guaranteed to elicit shouts of “Get the fuck on with it” plus the adoption of Jamie Oliver’s technique of looking just left of the camera. In …
This recipe does require the use of a pasta maker so you’ll need to have a rummage around in your cupboard of only-used-once things. There it is next to the Ken Hom wok set … to the left of the Jamie Oliver Flava Shaker … and behind everything you ever bought from the Lakeland catalogue.
I know, it’s the middle of January so it’s unlikely any of you lot (dear readers) are going to want to digest anything referring back to Christmas, Christmas dinner or any of its associated trimmings. But trust me, in 344 days, 2 hours, 37 minutes and 55 seconds (at time of writing) you’ll be desperately thumbing through books, magazines and …
Forget the mapping of the human genome, the discovery of the Higgs Boson God particle, or the invention of L’Oreal’s age defying Boswelox™, I think we here at Laboratoires Yumblog can humbly announce we have made the single greatest scientific breakthrough since our prehistoric ancestors rubbed two dinosaurs together and conjured up fire. Like many of humanity’s greatest achievements it …
For some time it has been our mission here at the Castle Yumblog to create the perfect sourdough loaf – a subtle alchemy of simple and ancient ingredients – flour – water – salt – animated into being by wild airborne yeasts, and sculpted into final form by that most primitive of the elemental forces, fire (gas mark 9). A …
What could be more patriotic and celebratory of sixty years on the throne than baking a batch of white rolls? Actually lots of things – but none of them took place here at the Socialist Republic of Yumblog.
Perhaps with the exception of the odd East End boozer and the ready availability of Waitrose, there are not many things to miss about no longer being in that there London. However, living as we do in the heartland of Greggs, we have yet to find any bakers which sell a decent loaf – some have made wild and reckless …
Well I never, I’ve just discovered our local Morrisons now sells packets of fresh yeast for breadmaking… and at the very reasonable price of 50p for 126g. This was unexpected because a) as far as I know you can’t even get it at Waitrose, and b) Morrisons is very much at the (Sp)Asda end of the supermarket spectrum and tends …
At the last count Yumblog Junior had an impressive vocabulary of 38½ distinct words*. These range from the traditional and vital Mummy, Daddy, Dog, Cat through Cheese, Spoon, Cock-a-doodle-doo to more personal choices such as Shoes, Crumpet and Cheers (accompanied by the touching of the parental beer glasses). One of her first and still most frequently used words is B’nana …
The inverted commas are there because this loaf contains no yeast and is actually more of a savoury cake than a bread. This has the added advantage that as well as being pleasantly toothsome, it can also manifest from a wishful inkling to an incontrovertible plateful in just under an hour and a half. That’s quicker than it takes to …
Hello again dear reader and sorry for the brief interruption in transmission but the logistics of relocating the entire Yumblog Corporate Empire Inc. from fashionable East London to its new HQ in the even more fashionable outskirts of Media City, plus the switch over from analogue to digital (can you see the difference in quality?), has meant that only now …
Trawling through the dusty archives in the Fanny Craddock Wing of the Great Library here at Yumblog Towers, it seems that in all our years as honoured custodians of this esteemed and venerable blog, we have never written up a recipe for pizza. A possible explanation for this (should your legal department require one) is that maybe in the past …
Watching Michel Roux eulogising the virtues of hand-crafted bread on the ‘Great British Food Revival‘ reminded me that shamefully I hadn’t baked a loaf for several weeks. Thus suitably laden with middle-class guilt I put on a pinny, grabbed a jar of Mathos Organic Polygonum Honey (dark, strong and liquorice-ee) and made this simple white loaf. And on the subject …
Fellow bloggers… is it a crime to recycle an old post?
It’s ok, put the dogs back in their kennels, tether the steed, the search is over, we’ve found it. The perfect white bread f’toasting is here and even better hardly any kneading is needed. Brilliant.
This recipe was the result of a pioneering scientific experiment to recreate something similar to Dr. Karg Crispbreads which, despite their medical honorific and Teutonic wholemeal worthiness are surprisingly tasty and addictive – especially if topped with a wedge of Extra Mature and a dollop of Branston. And so to the experiment…not being experts in this particular field, we first went …
Hmm, onions, hmm, bread, hmm, onion bread, hmm, onion bread in individual portions, hmm, lovely lunch.
It’s finals week and MasterChef has entered the wacky ‘It’s a Knock Out’ stage. The three finalists are being set some fairly arbitrary ‘tough’ tasks such as last night when they were shipped out to Jodhpur in order to cook for some royal toffs in 120 degrees of heat. No doubt tonight they’ll be forced to run around the kitchen …
What to do on Easter Sunday when you’ve already filled the cupboards with tasties but there is a sweet tea-time shaped hole in the kitchen – it’s actually a hatch, but I saw Doctor Who and I know all about holes and cracks in walls and time/space continua and giant eyes. So anyway, hot cross buns. With a twist. I, …
Well I suppose that’s the surprise spoilt already.
This is a recipe from the Hairy Bakers/Bikers. It’s meant to contain brown ale but we didn’t have any so instead I used an alcohol-free driving Cobra which was gathering dust in the fridge. Let’s be honest, it was never going to get drunk.
‘Eating lots of white bread raises the risk of a cancer that kills thousands of Britons every year … those who eat five slices a day are almost twice as likely to develop the most common form of kidney cancer compared to those who have one and a half slices.’… or so says that putrid voicepiece of everything that is …
Another recipe purloined from Dan ‘Pour some sugar on me’ Lepard, which was in turn of other provenance, but such is cooking, dishes are passed from one to another and in doing so they evolve. Talking of Darwin, he was 200 the other day you know and Google honoured this on their homepage. I wonder how many deluded creationists boiled …