Latest Content:
A little like pizza, or bruschetta; an oily loaf
You can have the perfect pizza at home, one that I can be put together in the same time it takes to venture into the night to visit the local licence-to-print-money. And you don’t have to make the dough. You don’t even need focaccia.
All you need is a white cottage loaf — the sort with [...]
Focaccia, pizza, or whatever
Don’t be fooled by all the terrific press about focaccia. It’s just a flash name for flat bread. You make it just the same way as bread, treat it the same way as bread, love it just the same way.
If you make it yourself, or buy it (usually at an exorbitant price), it makes for [...]
Sourdough, from the beginning
When you have made sourdough bread you have returned to the dark ages, when bread makers were feeling their way, and strange things happened to the pile of dough in the corner of the cave; the only machines were their arms, and the bread tasted different every time it came out of the coals.
It’s very [...]
Bread, for starters
Funny thing about making bread. If you succeed, people look at you as if you have just taken a set off Steffi Graf. But the great irony here is that cave dwellers were making bread before they discovered there was more to communicating than grunting and pointing, and screaming and hitting people over the head [...]
Baking: no short cuts
Baking is not one of my strengths. For one simple reason. The best baker is one who methodically follows routines and directions. That’s not me. The best baker is one who bakes constantly; who has taken the routines into the soul and can reproduce them this way and that at will; that’s not me either. [...]
Muesli with strawberries, bananas and coconut milk
Once I started to think seriously about breakfast, questions started popping up here there and everywhere.
Should we eat breakfast at all? Contradictions galore here from a stream of experts. When I was young I was sure the first meal of the day should be considered a visit to the fuel pump. Fill ‘er up. This [...]
A cake of rhubarb
Rhubarb, you might have noticed, is one of my favourite fruits. Well, it’s not really a fruit, but a stalk, but that’s for botanists. If you eat it like a fruit, then to me it’s a fruit, which makes a tomato a vegetable, although it’s a fruit, and who cares anyway?
Whatever it is, I have [...]
Cold rhubarb souffle, cream and air
I was cooking for my daughter’s first birthday, and wanted to provide something the mature three- and four-year-olds could go ooh and aah over and then stick their fingers in, causing parents to scold; something that would have them lining up for seconds. I went for a cold rhubarb souffle, light as a feather, held [...]
Rhubarb souffle, from the boot
Now that you have conquered the souffle, it’s time to get arrogant. This is the sort of souffle you can prepare at home, toss in the boot of a car, and cook it at a friend’s place. And it’s impossibly simple.
This one’s made with rhubarb, but any fruit that produces a thick richly flavoured puree [...]
Slattery’s summer souffle, Christmas 1990 and forever more
The perfect Christmas present from a cook has to be something fantastic, yet simple to make, something surprising, yet so obvious when you make it; full of colour without gratuity; and something you’d want to make again and again and again. And it has to be seasonal, of summer exclusively, so it will be longed [...]