Western Morning News (Saturday)
Finding rays of sunshine in the kitchen
Martin Hesp says that experiments with cooking have kept him sane in a pandemic
They say necessity is the mother of invention, and it is - the only problem is that inventions don’t always work. That is what I was thinking last night as I peered down at my mess of a dinner. What had made me think that cooking pizzas in an air-fryer would be a good idea?
I don’t know about fellow home-cooks, but there has been a great deal of necessity-is-motherof-invention syndrome going on in the Hesp kitchen over recent months.
To take just one example: without a bit of experimentation, how else are you going to make frozen vegetables taste good and interesting?
Frozen meat? No problem. Same with frozen fish, as long as it’s not been in the ice too long. Morrisons (where I get my Covid-safe “click and collect”) does a great new line in various frozen shellfish - and they’re good too as long as your remember to thaw and clean out the sand from the razor clams. But veg is another matter.
Non-frozen veg has an inherent freshness which can break down very rapidly for various scientific reasons that I only just understand. Something to do with sugars turning to starches.
The frozen pea, of course, represents the one outstanding exception. It’s one of the best industrially processed foods ever invented. But the likes of broccoli or Brussel sprouts straight from the freezer can leave a lot to be desired. And if a pea can be so good, why can’t a fresh frozen broad bean? No matter how posh the brand, they just aren’t ever as good as the real thing from the garden.
Which is where necessity being the mother of invention comes in. If you whizz up frozen broccoli with some stilton to make a
warming winter soup, for example, it works just as well as a handful fresh florets. If you sit for hours de-skinning each and every baby broad bean, the little green bombs you’ll reveal are pretty good. My “invention” of the week was a salad made from thinly sliced but tired looking oranges, some green olives from a can and a few bits of crumbled feta.
The reason I’m “making do” with whatever comes to hand is because Covid has come to our village. Indeed, you may have seen in the regional news that West Somerset (where I live) tops the Westcountry infection rate day after day - so I’m in no hurry to leave my rural home, preferring instead to do a “click and collect” once every couple of weeks.
For years as a roving journalist my dietary modus operandi was based on whatever I’d bought in the past day or two. If I’d been near a fishing harbour, we’d have fresh seafood, if I’d been to some Westcountry market town where I knew a good traditional butcher, we’d have meat, if I’d spotted some beautiful fresh picked cauliflowers on a Cornish farm gate stall…
You get the picture. It was all about: what’s new, what’s in season, what’s good?
Now it’s reduced to clicking items on a screen and picking them up once a fortnight in a supermarket carpark.
Just about as Covid-secure as you can get and we get fed - so I’m not complaining. But it’s not the ideal way to live.
It means the home-cook has to make up for freshness or for the lack of brilliant ingredients by being inventive. And, as I’ve mentioned, it doesn’t always work.
I was using my own sourdough base to make the pizzas and one thing about sourdough is that it benefits from a high heat when cooking. Our domestic fan oven doesn’t really cut the mustard and on a stormy night I didn’t want to go outdoors and light the wood-fired Morso oven just to make a couple of small pizzas.
As a proud owner on an appliance called an Instant Pot Duo, I began to wonder about its air-fryer facility. The remarkable machine is both a pressure cooker and an air-fryer, depending on which lid you use - and I know the latter reaches very hot temperatures because it’ll cook crispy roast potatoes in 20 minutes.
So why not bung in a small pizza and see what happens?
I still don’t know why it was a failure. Maybe my homemade dough wasn’t up to the job or perhaps the heat inside an air-fryer circulates in some way I had not imagined. Whatever the reason, the results represented the worst of pizza evils: underside done nicely to a crisp, but topping more of a floury puddle where it sank into uncooked dough.
Disappointing. But at least during lockdown we have time to mess around and experiment with food. There are recipes for air-fryer pizzas on the Internet, so it must be possible - next time I’ll try a conventional base rather than sourdough.
Because, as most home-cooks know, the wild and moody sourdough is a difficult beast to tame. Wild: because it relies on natural yeasts that happen to be floating around in your location. Moody: because those wild yeasts do what they want, rather than what some industrial chemist has designed them to do.
A couple of years ago I was writing in these pages about my sourdough failures - now, countless loaves later thanks to time in lockdown, I am celebrating success. We haven’t bought bread from a shop for six months. The loaves aren’t going to win any baking competitions, specially not in the looks-department - but I have found a way of making sourdough work time and time again and the bread is delicious. Plus I know exactly what has gone into each loaf Matthews Cotswold Flour, filtered water a pinch of Cornish sea salt, and that is it.
I am certain that a sourdough experts like Andy Tyrrell, who used to be head chef at River Cottage and who has taught special bread classes at the excellent Lark’s Live online cookery school, would not exactly approve of my methods,
but they work for me. The fact that my bread comes out the shape of an excellent non-stick pan would be a big no-no for true artisan bakers who prefer a classic French buole shape. But as I say, I don’t care. Lockdown has allowed me the time to make many tweaks and changes and generally each loaf has been better than the last. Without the rigours enforced by staying at home, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to keep on plugging away.
Several BBC Radio news programmes have been asking listeners to name things which have brightened up their days during these dark months - and I reckon there must be tens of thousands of home-cooks out there who’ll say that having time to mess about in the kitchen has taught them all sorts of new skills, alongside pitfalls they must avoid. Which, surely, has to be a ray of sunshine in a hungry world…
THE woodpigeon always looks well fed, given its portly frame and relatively short legs. It is a bird that has benefitted from changing farming practices, such as autumn sown cereals and increased cultivation of oilseed rape, which gives them plenty to feed on through the winter months.
They are now one of our most common birds. Along with being robust in build and unfussy eaters, woodpigeons can also breed at pretty much any time of the year if the conditions are favourable. They may start as early as February and, in urban areas, keep going into November, laying their white eggs on a rather flimsy platform of sticks in a tree or bush. In fact, although their main nesting period is between April and October, they have been recorded breeding in every month of the year.