Every now and again you come across a word you think is a bit of an exaggeration, but then once you follow through with it you find out it’s an understatement. Really I should have picked it from the recipe but I had enough on my mind to really think it through. Five eggs, a bit of brandy, mascarpone, half a kilo of nuts and plenty of dark chocolate. Yeah. Rich. It was as much of a meal as the Spiced Lamb Pistachio and Beetroot Salad I actually had for dinner.

Rich Italian Chocolate Cake with Crushed Hazelnuts

Rich Italian Chocolate Cake with Crushed Hazelnuts
250g hazelnuts
250g of almond meal
250g of dark chocolate, finely chopped
100mL of brandy
60mL of espresso
1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons of milk
1 cup of caster sugar
5 large eggs, separated
1 tub of mascarpone

Heat the oven to 180ºC. Grease two 20cm sponge tins and dust with cocoa. Roast the hazelnuts on an oven tray for 15 minutes until the skins are blackened, wrap in a tea-towel and let them steam and cool. Rub off the skins then grind in a food processor.

Mix the first seven ingredients plus half of the sugar and the egg yolks in a large bowl until well combined. Whisk the egg whites in a separate bowl to soft peaks then slowly beat in the rest of the sugar until the egg whites are glossy. In several small batches, gently mix the egg whites into the cake mix. Divide the mix between the two sponge tins and bake in the middle shelf of the oven for 45min to an hour or until a skewer comes out clean, or with a few crumbs. Leave it to cool .

Spread the mascarpone on the top of one of the cakes then squish the second one on top, dusk with icing sugar and serve with either more mascarpone or some ice cream.

UPDATE: I gave the rest of this cake to some friends the following day and it tasted even better once the flavours had time to properly mingle with each other. So I’d recommend making the cakes, leaving them wrapped in plastic in the fridge for 24 hours and then spreading them with mascarpone and serving it with ice cream.

Tags:Chocolate, Hazelnut, Eggs, Cake, Mascarpone, Recipe

I’ve had plans to have a friend over for dinner tonight for a little while and I was racking my mind to find something to make and just couldn’t put my finger on it until fate stepped in and delivered the latest edition of Delicious magazine just as I was heading out the door. Step in Spiced Lamb with mint yoghurt and pistachio. I decided against the salad in the magazine, the cucumber and tomato salad with lemon and dijon dressing and decided to use the beetroot I had left in the fridge. Here’s my version.

Spiced Lamb with Pistachio and Beetroot Salad with Orange Dressing

The lamb itself was tender and cooked to just pink with a brilliant sumac based spice rub and the orange and honey in the dressing balanced out the beetroot. A bit of cumin in the dressing tied it in with the lamb and a bit of honey did the same for the yoghurt.

Spiced Lamb Pistachio - Serves 2
2 lamb back-straps
2 garlic cloves
2 tablespoons of olive oil
½ tablespoon of coriander seeds
1½ tabelspoon of cumin seeds
1½ tabelspoon of allspice
2 tabelspoon of sumac
¼ cup of shelled pistachios, crushed

Mint Yoghurt
½ cup of yoghurt
1 tabelspoon of finely sliced mint leaves
½ tabelspoon of honey

Beetroot Salad with Orange Dressing
1 beetroot, diced
1 potato, diced
½ cup of grated carrot
½ tabelspoon of fresh ground cumin seeds
1 teaspoon of orange zest
juice of 1 orange
½ tabelspoon of honey
2 handfuls of salad leaves

Starting with the beetroot salad; steam the beetroot for about an 30-45 minutes or until it’s fairly tender but still has a bit of resistance. Add the potato and carrot and continue to steam until all is tender and the tip of a knife has no resistance left to it. Toss through the salad leaves and put aside until serving. Mix the remaining salad ingredients into a bowl for the dressing.

For the mint yoghurt, mix it all together. Put aside until serving.

Lamb. Toss the lamb, garlic and oil together and stand to marinade for two hours. Grind and mix the spices together. Once the lamb has marinaded for the set time, rub the spice mix all over the meat and fry or bbq on medium-high for 5 minutes each side. Take the lamb off the heat and wrap in foil for 8-10 minutes to rest.

Dress and plate the salad. Slice the lamb back-strap on the diagonal and plate. Sprinkle with the pistachios and drizzle around the mint yoghurt.

Tags:Middle Eastern, Lamb, Pistachio, Sumac, Delicious, Herbs, Recipe, Spices, Salad, Beetroot, Oranges

Recently, I received an email from a close friend asking for a bit of advice on some kitchen tools. Here’s the core of the email, slightly edited for relevance and for anonymity:


[From: GS - 11 October 2008 9:09:10 AM

Hi Will,

I had a couple of foodie questions I thought you might be able to help me with.
 
The first is slightly embarrassing. With the weather warming my thoughts turn to my annual summer menu trauma. I’m very much a hot food winter cook.
 
I’m thinking this year I might try to do more stir-fries through summer, but EVERY time I cook a stir fry the place completely fills with smoke. The meal’s OK, but the smoke lingers here for hours. I figure I’m doing something wrong, but want someone to perhaps witness my mistakes (hence the discomfort) and let me know what I’m doing wrong.
 
Onto more fun things, I’m wondering if you’ve ever seen a home nut-roasting setup?
 
I roast nuts on a weekly basis (even if it’s just a packet of pine nuts) and I’ve been thinking for some time of building (if I can’t buy) a setup designed to roast nuts. I’ve taken inspiration from the chocolate-coating machines at Haighs that resemble concrete mixers! I think a metal vessel (like a small mulk-frothing jug) rotating off axis with a hair drier (or “heatshrink gun” – similar to hair drier but DANGEROUSLY hot) stuffed into the opening is probably going to do the job nicely, and on the sort of scale I require.
 
But the overpriced eBay jobbies are an interesting approach. Or just the drum on its own.) What do you think. Had any ideas, or seen devices that are designed to do that job?

G.]


Happy to try and help you out with your foodie questions if I can.

As far as your stir-fry problems are concerned: Yes you can have the heat too high. The temps are important for stir-fries, when you add meat or veg to a wok it lowers the temp and releases water. If the temp is too low, the vegetables, meat etc will stew in their own juices instead of searing and sealing which is the point of stir-fry. Too high a temp and your oil will start to burn causing smoke and flavour changes in the food; or you know, a fire. 

Who ever it was that said to cook things like steak and stir-fry at the highest possible temp probably said it when domestic stoves couldn't get above 200ºC (can we blame Bernard King?). Your stove is a bit more than standard domestic so yes, it could be getting too hot. 

Sounds like you're using a fairly neutral tasting oil because the smoke isn't affecting the taste of the food, just your ability to see it. There's a Table of Smoke Points at Cooking for Engineers that will give you an idea of what oil can do what. Stay clear of oils with a flavour to them because if they do burn, you'll taste it in the food. If you want the flavour cheat and drizzle a little bit over once it's cooked. 

You can use a low temp oil for stir-frying, the catch is that your wok will be have a lower maximum temp due to the oil so you will have less of a range to cook in. Each time you add something it will lower the temp for a while and take longer for the released water to evaporate so it’s fine if you're cooking small amounts but otherwise you might need to cook each ingredient type in batches so they don't stew until everything is cooked. At that point you can add everything in together to warm  through. If you use a higher temp oil your wok can be hotter so there is a bigger range to drop in temp before it's too cold so you can add more stuff at a time.

Your nuts:
The overpriced internet jobbies are just coffee roasters with the word coffee scratched out and replaced with a 20% premium which is hard to do on something that's already as marked-up as coffee.

I'm sure there are others, but a 2 minute google search came up with Sweet Marias, that have a variety to choose from and what seems to be cheap compared to the ebay one you sent me.

If you want to make your own, you might want to have a look at this design for the UglyRoast

OR; also from Make, but in the physical magazine I've got here are the instructions for a more McGyver esq coffee roaster made from a metal sieve locked into the head of a cordless screwdriver which together are mounted at 45º  to a small camp stove so that the sieve is above the flame. Toss in a cup of coffee beans (or nuts), light the stove, turn on the drill and the sieve rotates al la haighs drum.

Tags:Asian, Nuts

For something salty to nibble on for my housewarming I decided to make a quick batch of toasted hazelnuts with fresh thyme. It’s tasty and a little different to what you’d usually come across. The recipe is easily doubled or quadrupled which is good because with the thyme, salt and olive oil they’re incredibly moorish.

Hot Roasted Hazelnuts with Thyme

Hot Roasted Hazelnuts with Thyme - Makes 2 Cups
2 Cups of Hazelnuts
2 Tablespoons of fresh thyme
½ Tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil

Heat the oven to 200ºC and roast the hazelnuts until brown, about 10-15 minutes. Keep checking so they don’t burn. When they’re done, cover with a tea towel and let them steam and cool. Rub the skins off and place in a frying pan. Turn up the heat and add the oil and thyme and warm through.

Tags:Hazelnut, Herbs, Quick, Housewarming

Tonight when I had a friend coming over for dinner and not really knowing what to cook I thought I’d give one of my newer cookbooks the test. 3 Ways With Stale Bread by Ross Dobson is an interesting concept, picking out all of those ingredients that sit in a cupboard for ages never being used because they were surplus of something else you’ve made be it some lentils, frozen berries or peantus as I used here with a peanut curry as a way to use up the jar of red curry paste, peanuts, coconut cream and pretty much everything else in this recipe except the thai basil and the rump steak. I would have looked into those cupboards for hours trying to figure out what to do with each one of these. In the end, I still had to adjust a few things because I couldn’t find any thai basil at the grocer but what the hey.

The book itself is split between things you’ll find in the cupboard, fridge or freezer and is really well cross referenced eg: “Peanuts also used in recipes on pages, 18, 21, 36...”.

The curry, which I renamed a satay wasn’t bad but it could have used a bit of fresh lime juice over the top to give it the salty/sweet/sour flavour combination that thai cooking is famous for.

Beef and Broccoli Satay

Beef and Broccoli Satay - Serves 2
500g Rump Steak, cut into strips across the grain
2 tablespoons of red curry paste
2 tablespoons of peanut butter
½ peanuts
1 tin of coconut milk (or cream thinned with water)
1 cup of broccoli foretts
1 cup of sliced red capsicum
1 lime cut into wedges
2 cups of cooked jasmine rice to serve
corriander to garnish (optional)

In a very hot wok, fry the beef in batches until it’s brown all over and set it aside.

Add the red curry paste to the wok and fry for a minute until it becomes fragrant. Keep stiring it or else it’ll burn. Add the peanut butter, peanuts and the coconut milk and simmer until the sauce has reduced by half. Add the broccoli and capsicum and simmer until tender. Mix the beef back in and simmer for a minute until the beef is hot again.

Serve over rice and with a wedge of lime on the side to help cut through the thickness of the sauce and to give it a bit of an extra tang.

Tags:Satay, Beef, Rice, Peanuts, Peanut Butter, Curry

Via The Kitchn, I came across something stunning that I knew I had to bake as soon as humanly possible. A Hazelnut and Brown Butter Cake covered in chocolate ganache. Of course, I threw in my own twist with a layer of apple between the cake and the chocolate, to make it my own. Pears would have worked well too but I happened to have some delicious apples sitting around that were begging to be eaten.

Hazelnut and Apple Cake with Chocolate Ganache

This isn't any ordinary cake, it's more of a dacquoise which is a meringue or cream with ground nuts mixed in. Today I used Hazelnuts left over from the torte I made a few weeks ago. The tricky things with this cake is the air bubbles from the beaten eggs is what gives this cake its light and delicate structure, and probably explains why mine sunk a little in the middle and broke apart as it cooled. Chocolate to the rescue to cover those bits up though!

Apple and Hazelnut and Brown Butter Cake

1 Cup of Hazelnuts
3 Apples
250g Unsalted Butter
1 Vanilla Bean
1⅓ Cups of Icing Sugar
⅓ Cups of Flour
5 Egg Whites
3 Tablespoons of Castor Sugar
100 grams Dark Chocolate
⅓ Cup of Thickened Cream

Pre-heat the oven to 170°C

Place the hazelnuts on a baking tray and bake for 15 minutes. When done wrap them in a tea-towel and let them steam until cool. Rub them in the towel to remove all of the skins.

Line the bottom of a 10" cake tin with baking paper and butter the edges. Slice the apples thinly and layer evenly on the bottom of the cake tin.

Place the butter and seeds from the vanilla bean in a saucepan and melt together, stirring often until the butter has browned.

Grind the hazelnuts and icing sugar together until the nuts are fine, mix with the flour and set aside.

In a stand mixer, whisk together the egg whites and castor sugar until stiff-peaks are formed in the egg whites. Alternating between the nut mixture and the butter in thirds, combine with the egg whites. Pour the final mixture over the apples in the cake tin and bake in the oven for 40 minutes.

Let the cake cool completely and turn out, upside down on the platter you're going to serve it on so the apples are on top.

While the cake is cooling, over a double boiler melt the chocolate and then whisk in the cream. Pour the ganache over the cake and spread evenly. Allow to cool and set.

Update: Actually, after typing out the recipe, I think I forgot to add the flour! It still looks and tastes okay but it would add to the reason the cake was so delicate.

Tags:Recipe, Hazelnut, Nuts, Chocolate, Dessert, Butter, Vanilla