Cooking tips and wonderful flavour combinations

Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
baboon2004 said:
lemon (rind and juice) and parmesan is the nicest food combination ever...
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Yeah, it's classic. We just had broccoli with lemon, parmesan, olive oil, garlic and chilli flakes and it was ace.

ALSO

Hugh Fearnley-Whatshisface's beetroot and walnut 'hummus' is AMAZING. It's like purple crack. There's a recipe here, but the basic idea is liquidized walnuts and beetroot (about 1:4 by weight), with a handful of breadcrumbs to thicken it and tahini, garlic, lemon juice, ground cumin, salt, pepper and olive oil as seasoning. It's really quite improbably good.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Sweet-cured rollmops with buttery-mustardy-herby mash and rocket soused in olive oil, lemon juice and sea salt. Tastiness/effort ratio: 800 millislaters.
 
M

muser

Well-known member
baboon2004 said:
lemon (rind and juice) and parmesan is the nicest food combination ever...

with the scrambled eggs/omelette, try chili/garlic/root ginger/buttery onions. you could doubtless add either cumin or coriander to that too. The ginger in partic lifts it amazingly.
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ah yes i can see onion going good with that, I have done onion before in my many attempts at pimping scrambled eggs ha, but I think it would be a good addition. Ginger I have never tried though which I will be the next on my list, seems like an obvious ommision now I think about it.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Seriously, scrambled eggs on toast with smoked salmon on top (buy offcuts but get as nice stuff as you can afford) and a few sprigs of dill plus a glass of bubbly (optional) is about as near to perfection as breakfast gets...
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Slothrop said:
Seriously, scrambled eggs on toast with smoked salmon on top (buy offcuts but get as nice stuff as you can afford) and a few sprigs of dill plus a glass of bubbly (optional) is about as near to perfection as breakfast gets...
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It's very very nice, but for me would be pipped to the post by menemen. Some of the stuff you can get at cafes in Dalston is incredible.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
That does look nice. Or rather, it looks messy but looks like it tastes nice. Also looks fairly close to the scrambled egg version of piperade?

Come to think of it, eggs in spicy tomato sauce might be another of those weird culinary continua, running from north africa (shakshouka) and the Basque country (piperade) along the Mediterranean to India (I've got a Madhur Jaffrey recipe somewhere for the Indian version). Not sure whether there's a Middle Eastern version or a Greek or Italian one, though...

In other news, I've just made some Talisker ice cream. Oh yes.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Warm up 600ml double cream with de-seeded vanilla pod, bring to the boil, add some sugar, continue to heat gently until sugar dissolves, gradually whisk it into four egg yolks, strain, add the seeds from the vanilla pod, add a couple of shots of talisker, put it in a box and freeze it.

Edit - it's good. Very rich, but good. I'm probably going to try dishing it up with some banana and toasted oats.

Apparently using double cream means that you don't have to stir it at all. Next time I might use something a bit lighter and accept having to stir it from time to time, so we can eat more than a teaspoonful at a time without risking an immediate heart attack.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Slothrop said:
That does look nice. Or rather, it looks messy but looks like it tastes nice. Also looks fairly close to the scrambled egg version of piperade?

Come to think of it, eggs in spicy tomato sauce might be another of those weird culinary continua, running from north africa (shakshouka) and the Basque country (piperade) along the Mediterranean to India (I've got a Madhur Jaffrey recipe somewhere for the Indian version). Not sure whether there's a Middle Eastern version or a Greek or Italian one, though...
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Not sure about piperade....vaguely heard of it, but no more...looks very similar though, googling it. Shakshouka looks to be a M eastern version.

http://www.umamiinfo.com/ - very interesting articles on tomatoes here. the heston blumenthal experiment is partic interesting
 
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N

Numbers

Well-known member
Slothrop said:
Not sure whether there's a Middle Eastern version or a Greek or Italian one, though...
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Presentazione-uova-al-pomodoro-450x337.jpg


Recipe
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Nice.

Come to that, one of my favourite occasional weekend breakfasts is this:
2848935968_f4b4b0d3e5.jpg

http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/09/eggs-in-tomato-sauce-contest-winners/
which is a simple but effective take on the same idea - quickly fry chopped garlic and a few chilli flakes in olive oil, add a tin of tomatoes, simmer for 20 mins, season, poach eggs on the top, serve on bread / toast.

Meanwhile, in seriously geeky news, I've started getting the pairings in The Flavour Thesaurus into some Python code, so I can do some graph theory type analysis of them... about halfway through and have started finding some mammoth six way combos...
 
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4linehaiku

4linehaiku

Repetitive
Slothrop said:
Meanwhile, in seriously geeky news, I've started getting the pairings in The Flavour Thesaurus into some Python code, so I can do some graph theory type analysis of them... about halfway through and have started finding some mammoth six way combos...
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Holy shit that sounds amazing can you upload the source please?
Edit: Ok this is getting really nerdy but if you put it on github I could fork it and help out adding entries as I have a copy of The Flavour Thesaurus as well.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Slothrop said:
Meanwhile, in seriously geeky news, I've started getting the pairings in The Flavour Thesaurus into some Python code, so I can do some graph theory type analysis of them... about halfway through and have started finding some mammoth six way combos...
Click to expand...

I'd just like to second 4LH's opinion that this is freakin' rad. I think Randall 'xkcd' Monroe would heartily approve.
 
4linehaiku

4linehaiku

Repetitive
Just to continue the thought, are there any other good resources for this sort of thing on the net? May have been some mentioned in this thread, but it's quite long now and I don't fancy trawling through. A quick google search reveals foodpairing.com but that costs €15 a month. Seems weird as surely this is an ideal topic for a spot of crowd sourcing.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
It used to be free :(

I looked a lot but there were no others as good. Flavour Thesaurus is way better anyways. Few websites have approached this kind of thing systematically.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
4linehaiku said:
Holy shit that sounds amazing can you upload the source please?
Edit: Ok this is getting really nerdy but if you put it on github I could fork it and help out adding entries as I have a copy of The Flavour Thesaurus as well.
Click to expand...

Will do when I get time.

On a semi-related note, does anyone know anything about matching wine and food? I know very little about wine, but I've occasionally been recommended to wine / food pairings that were absolutely magic, and I'd like to be able to figure that sort of stuff out for myself a bit more...
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm very far from an expert on this, but I've found sauvignon blanc goes really nicely with delicately spiced SE Asian grub. Works best when it's warm and sunny, of course.
 
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