How to eat out, how to eat in
Will restaurants survive?
Restaurants that survived being in “enforced hibernation” during the lockdown face further challenges when it ends, says Jay Rayner in The Observer: it won’t be cheap for them to reopen their doors: wage bills will return; kitchens will need to be restocked. But will they have enough customers to cover those costs? The optimistic view is that after a lengthy lockdown, “everyone” will be desperate to return to normal life. Yet many restaurateurs fear the opposite: that a lingering fear of crowded spaces (and, perhaps, a newly discovered love of home cooking) will result in people continuing to stay at home. But even if the punters do come, social distancing measures are likely to restrict how many diners any restaurant can accommodate – and that could also spell financial disaster. As Russell Norman, who spent a day measuring the floor space at one branch of his “normally bustling” Polpo group, puts it: “Keeping everyone two metres apart would require taking out two-thirds of the seats, and that simply wouldn’t be economically viable.” One thing that is clear is that if we want restaurants to thrive in future, “we, the diners” need to return to them as soon as possible – even if it’s only for takeaways.
The truth about decanting
“It is one of the time-honoured rituals of opening a decent bottle of wine,” says
Valentine Low in The Times: after drawing the cork, you let the bottle sit there untouched for a couple of hours – or pour its contents into a decanter. But whether this serves any purpose remains a bone of contention. Wine writer Martin Isark says it’s basically a “myth” that wine needs to “breathe”. Letting a bottle stand open will have “little or no effect on taste”, he says, because the narrowness of the neck means that barely any of the wine will be exposed to oxygen. As for decanting, in the past there were quite a lot of highly tannic wines, such as big Barolos, that benefited from it, but these “are a rare beast now”. The Times wine critic Jane
MacQuitty reckons even “young, tight wines” don’t need decanting: “just splash them into your glass and give it a twirl or two for them to open up”. The only point of decanting is to pour off the sediment that a few “venerable” clarets or ports may have acquired.
Baking without any flour
Bakers are a “resourceful lot”, says Tony Turnbull in The Times, and over the years they’ve “learnt all manner of clever tricks to compensate for the absence of key ingredients”. No sugar? Use golden syrup, dates or even root vegetables. No butter? There’s always margarine or olive oil. Flour, though, is a different matter. It is the “main building block of baking”, and you’ll never be able to achieve certain things without it – such as a “perfect, light-as-a-feather sponge cake”. With flour still absent from many supermarkets, it could be tempting to abandon baking – but it’s far better to just bake different things. Channel your inner child, and give flapjacks a go, or “perhaps those chocolate Rice Krispie cakes. Exceptionally squidgy brownies can be made without flour: there are plenty of recipes on the internet. And if you take your inspiration from Italy, you can make delicious cakes with no flour, advises chef Theo Randall. Torta caprese, for example, is made of equal quantities of ground almonds, melted chocolate, butter and sugar, plus eggs.