Bread, Cakes And Ale

January 30, 2014 · 4:27 pm

Converting plain to self-raising flour

Catchy title eh?

A lot of UK recipes call for self-raising flour. Self-raising flour is nothing fancy – it’s just plain (all-purpose) flour with a chemical raising agent, baking powder, already in the mix.

Self-raising flour was invented by Bristol baker Henry Jones, who patented it in 1845. It played a role in phasing out the notoriously solid ship’s biscuits and replacing them with an alternative: chemically leavened “bread” baked fresh at sea or even on the battlefront. Apparently his work was championed by Florence Nightingale and I believe self-raising flour was used to bake “bread” in the Crimean War.

I’m not sure about “bread” made with SR flour – it’d be much more like soda bread or scone that real bread – but it’s useful stuff for cakes and the like. A lot of bakers, however, prefer to just use plain flour then add the raising agent separately. This makes sense, as the chemicals in raising agents can lose their potency making resulting cakes inconsistent. Or home bakers might just have run out.

If you don’t have an SR flour, it’s easy to convert plain and use that in its place. Though as with so many of these things, online information isn’t always in agreement. So I’m going to work it out for myself.

Varying sources say: add 1 teaspoon to 110g, or 2 teaspoons for 150g (1t to 75g), or 2 1/2 to 500g flour (that is, 1t to 200g), and, in that strange world without sane metric measures, another says 2 teaspoons to a cup.

Converting one US cup of flour into grams is open to disagreement too. Online sources give the flour weight as between 120g and 150g. I’ve got a cup measure – marked as 236.64ml, the customary US cup size* – and in a very scientific experiment involving filling it with flour, tapping it to settle it then smoothing off the top, I got 144g. Then I did it again and got 133g. This variable is due to how compacted the powder is, and is one of the reasons using weighing your ingredients is, frankly, more accurate. So anyway, let’s say 140g. So 2t to one cup is 2t to 140g (or 1t to 70g).

Then there’s the whole question of how many grams are in a teaspoon of a powder like baking powder. Again, sources differ online. But a teaspoon is 5cc/5ml (even in the US it’s basically the same, 4.92892159375ml**). Doing another quick, very scientific experiment, I filled my 5ml teaspoon measure with baking powder, smoothed it off, and weighed it. I did the same with baking soda. Both came in at just shy of 5g, so 5g is good enough for me.

Now, I work in decimal and percentage terms, having grown up with silly old ounces and whatnot but left them behind when I discovered the comparitive simplicity of metric measures. It’s so much easier when you’re converting and scaling recipes too.

The percentages you want of the above suggestions of teaspoons per grams would be based on the combined weight of the two ingredients, ie how many percent is 5g (1t) baking powder of the 115g of flour plus baking powder?

Here are all the abovementioned amounts in percentage calculations:
5g of 75g = 5 ÷ 75 x 100 = 6.7%
5g of 80g = 5 ÷ 80 x100 = 6.3g
5g of 115g = 5 ÷ 115 x 100 = 4.3%
5g of 205g = 5 ÷ 205 x 100 = 2.4%
(figures rounded)

Personally, I’m inclined to split the difference, and indeed some older notes of mine say 4%, and another person online breaking it down comes out with 4.5%. So averaging out the above figures, you get 4.9%. For the sake of ease, let’s say 5%.

So if a recipe calls for 250g of self-raising flour, and you only have plain, you need 5% of that 250g to be baking powder. That’s 12.5g of baking powder. So 12.5g BP added to 237.5g plain flour makes 250g stand-in self-raising flour. Even a digital scale, however, doesn’t usually do half grams, so let’s say 12g to 238g. And if you really want to short-cut it, just use 2 well-filled teaspoons to the 238g.

Thrilling!

* A US legal cup is 240ml, an Australian/NZ etc cup is 250ml.
** Technically a US teaspoon relates to another strange archaic measure – it’s 1/3 US fluid dram.

38 Comments

Filed under Baking, Flour & grain, Misc

Tagged as conversion, flour, plain flour, self-raising flour

January 27, 2014 · 4:15 pm

Fine apples, rotten consumerism

When we got back from our travels just before Christmas, we travelled back and forth across the south of England on the train visting family. I’ve got a vivid memory of looking out of the window into gardens backing onto the train line, and seeing numerous apple trees, leafless in the winter cold, and surrounded by a carpet of rotting fruit.

When we finally moved back into our own house in Sussex, a similar sight met us with a tree in our garden. Clearly our tenants hadn’t been into apples. Or maybe they had – but like so many people, were inclined to buy plastic bags of New Zealand or South African or French (!!!!*) apples from the supermarket and ignore the free fruit growing just outside their own door.

Britain has been going this way for decades now. And it’s a great tragedy. Britain, especially the south of England, has an ancient history of apple growing. Cider is synonymous with Devon and Somerset, for starters. Yet I’ve got another strong memory of driving through Devon and stopping for a picnic – beside an orchard of mature apple trees, one of them vast like an oak, all of them dropping their fruit into a rotting carpet in the grass.

Rotten to the core
It’s not just the fruit that’s rotten though, it’s the supermarket-dominated system that somehow believes it makes more business sense – which is different to actual sense, common sense, or future-of-the-human-race sense – to waste or neglect or our produce that is.

Or, as Paul Waddington says in Seasonal Food, “… if a kilo of apples has made the flight from New Zealand in March, are they really going to taste as good as the stored British variety? … are the New Zealand apples really worth the kilo of CO2 they will produce compared to the 50g if the same kilo were sourced locally. Despite the fact that we grow perhaps the best apples in the world, Britain has lost 60 per cent of its apple orchards since 1970, thanks in part of the bureaucratic madness that paid growers to dig them up.”

The past few years we’ve at least been discussing the waste that goes into supermarkets only selling standardised fruit and veg (apples and tomatoes of ruthlessly controlled sizes and colours, carrots without protrusions and nobbles, bananas with very specific curves, etc). But is it already too late? Most of us have already forgotten what it’s like to eat seasonally, never mind the brainwashing that arrises from only ever encountering these cosmetically “perfect” supermarket products. We’re so out of touch with food production. I mean, when was the last time Britons en masse grew their own fruit and veg? Probably during the Second World War’s Dig for Victory, with perhaps some efforts in the 1970s inspired by The Good Life.

World leaders in apples
As with most things in life, all it needs is a little more education, and if people are better informed that can have a bearing on market forces. After all, as Waddington says, “We should be world leaders in apples. With judicious use of varieties and good storage, we can east our own produce almost all year round, with perhaps a brief gap in July.”

Now, it’s January, and the apple harvest here in England, usually August to October, is fading into a distant memory on the far side of Christmas. And yet, my local farmers’ market has one stall, Greenway Fruit Farm, that has a wonderful selection of apples. All are priced at £1.50 a kilo – which isn’t bad, as a quick scoot round mysupermarket.co.uk indicates all the UK supermarkets are selling apples at around £1.75 -£1.99 a kilo.

Last year, Britain had a “bumper apple harvest” after a dry summer, so there really is no excuse to not be eating home-grown apples his year. Not all of these apples will necessarily be cosmetically so shiny shiny, but then real apples, grown through traditional means without gallons of toxic sprays and without a wax-job, will never look like those silly massive red things you see in American movies.

Sheer variety
We have 2,300 varieties here (listed in The National Fruit Collection in Kent; there 2,500 grown in the US, for comparison, and 7,500 worldwide) and they vary remarkably in appearance, flavour and use. Some great for eating, some for juicing, some for cider, some for cooking.

Last week, I bought a good selection of Braeburns for eating. This variety is synonymous with NZ, where is was emerged in the 1950s near Motueka (a great place for fruit and hops), a Granny Smith-Lady Hamilton cross. It’s been grown here since the 1990s though, really coming into its own in the 2000s. Its popularity is understandable as it’s a medium-large, green and russet colour fruit with a crisp bite and taste that somehow blends sweet and tart, and can be a dessert apple and a cooking apple.

For cooking, however, I also stocked up Bramleys. This variety was, perhaps surprisingly, developed from a seed planted only in 1809 by a girl in Nottinghamshire. They were first sold commercially in 1862, soon becoming established as a significant crop. The original tree is still bearing fruit.

These are the quintessential British cooking variety, accounting for 95% of our cooking apples. Usually I get mine from my folks, who have a very handsome mid-sized tree in their garden that really cranks out bright green, occasionally pumpkin-sized fruit. The ones I bought on the market were a bit different though – the Greenway lady was excited about them as they had an unusual amount of red on their skins. They certainly worked wonderfully for an apple pie.

As English as apple pie
The recipe I used this time was from Andy Bates and his Street Feasts TV shows, which we’ve been enjoying on Freesat since we got home, got settled and got a telly. It features a slightly unusual pastry that eschews the more typical necessity for cold, cubed butter. Instead, butter and sugar are creamed together, egg is added, then self-raising flour – as such it’s more like a cake batter, though drier. The final results are more cakey too, with a more spongy crumbliness than a traditional short crumbliness. It’s rather good.

His recipe also uses a filling that’s not too sweet. In the show, he explained that’s because he’s pairing it with an ice cream made with condensed milk and hokey pokey (aka honeycomb, you know, like the stuff inside a Crunchie bar). I did make the ice cream – it’s easy, with no custards, no churning, but it is insanely sweet, and his quantities are weird, there’s way too much honeycomb. You can find his original recipe here; if you do fancy making the ice cream, I’d recommend halving the quantities of honeycomb.

Here’s the pie recipe:

Pastry
200g butter
200g caster sugar
1 egg
1 yolk
325g self-raising flour

1. Cream together the sugar and butter. The latter can be at room temp, or even warmed a little to make it easier to cream. I tend to nuke cold butter for a few seconds in the microwave, or if I’m using a metal mixing bowl, put in a low heat on the hob briefly.
2. Beat together the whole egg and egg yolk.
3. Cream the egg into the sugar-butter mixture.
4. Sieve the flour into the creamed mixture, combine and bring it together as a dough.
5. Wrap up the ball of dough in plastic and put it in the fridge to rest, for about an hour.
6. Make the filling.

Filling
1kg Bramley apples (about 5 or 6 medium-large ones)
50g butter
50g dark soft brown sugar
1 t ground cinnamon
Juice of 1 lemon

1. Peel, core and chop the apples into 2cm-ish cubes.
2. Warm the butter, sugar, cinnamon and juice together in a saucepan.
3. Add the apple pieces to the sugar mix and cook for about 10 minutes, stirring regularly to soften the chunks equally.
4. Cool the apple mixture.

Assembly
Water
Milk
Caster sugar

1. Preheat the oven 180C.
2. Cut a third of the pastry off the ball.
3. Roll the two-thirds chunk and use it to line a tin – in the show he used a 23cm loose-bottom cake tin, but Fran’s colleague in Rome lost mine (grrrr. Still annoyed about that, can’t find a non-non-stick replacement), so I used a 25cm loose-bottomed flan tin. You could use any sort of tin, around the same size (9-10 inches for you olde fashioned types).
4. This doesn’t need blind baking, so just add the cooled apple mixture.
5. Roll out the remaining pastry and cover, sealing the edge with water. It’s not the easiest pastry to roll, but don’t worry too much, it’s so cakey, it bakes fine even if you bodge the pastry case together in pieces.
6. Crimp the edge.
7. Brush the top with milk and sprinkle with caster sugar.
8. Bake for about 45 minutes, until nice and golden.
9. Leave to stand for about 10 minutes before serving.
10. Serve with his crazy sweet ice cream (seriously, I’ve got a sweet tooth, but that stuff was too much even for me), or some plain vanilla ice cream, or cream, or custard – whatever you fancy.

Most importantly, make it using local apples.

I urge you to track down local apples, support your local economy, support local producers, support your national economy, reduce the pollution of absurd food transportation.

If you don’t have an apple tree, family or friends may have one they don’t harvest. Or you could politely scrump some by asking a neighbour. Even if the fruit looks ugly, it could be very tasty – and great for cooking up. And it’s free.

Alternatively, stock up at a farmers’ market or farm shop. Failing that, ask for British apples in your supermarket. You should at least be able to find Bramleys as they store well and are available all year round.

China already produces 40% of the world’s apples. Britons, I ask you: in ten years, wouldn’t you rather the apples available to you in your local shop or market were actually from our own once great apple-growing nation than from the country whose incredible industrial drive and growth is rapidly taking over pretty much everything?**

* I’m using the !!!! to indicate a “For flipping flip’s sake” moment as this country is not only just across a thin stretch of water from us, it’s in the same hemisphere with the same flipping seasons.

** Don’t get me started on pine nuts – I can’t find any pine nuts in Britain that are grow in Europe. Or even the US. They’re all from China. It’s boggles me, yet most people don’t even seem to notice.

5 Comments

Filed under Misc, Other food, Pies & tarts, Puddings & desserts

Tagged as apple pie, apples, Bramleys, farmers market, local, seasonal

January 24, 2014 · 3:02 pm

Gluten-free, food fads and a lay discussion of the article ‘Does wheat make us fat and sick?’

After two years living in Italy, I was really surprised visiting New Zealand last year to see how ubiquitous the “gluten free” thing has become. Loads of cafés and bakeries had signs front and centre offering baked goods free of the perceived evils of gluten. It surprised me even more to see this has become commonplace in the UK too.

Although Eataly, the Slow Food-ish bourgeois supermarket in Rome, has a section of foods suitable for coeliac sufferers, generally I didn’t notice signs offering foodstuffs “senza glutine” in Italy. Sure they have bad baked products there in Italy, including crappy industrial white sliced (“pancarré”), but by and large there are still a lot more real bakeries selling real bread. The same thing that’s sustained humanity for centuries, and been the staff of life* for millennia.

What we’re experiencing is one of many battles being fought in today’s information wars, where lobbyists and their allied scientists, pseudo-scientists, semi-scientists and writers duke it out. Some represents the arable industry, or the (industrial) baked goods sector, others representing sections of the food industry, or sections of the media and publishing trade that are advocating a certain fad diet (low carb, carb-free, “paleo”, etc).

Every week, it seems, there’s another article in the media about the latest foodstuff that can satisfy dietary needs in lieu of wheat – quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, coconut flour, almond meal, flax seed meal, buckwheat, chia and teff. Despite the fact that human civilisation, in Eurasia at least, was largely built on the nutritional strengths of grains – first domesticated as far back as 10,000BCE, possibly earlier, in the Fertile Crescent.

One of the big guns in the recent anti-wheat lobby is American cardiologist William R Davis, who published a book called Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health in 2011.

I’d seen the guy’s spiel on CBS and was partially drawn in – he said that modern wheat strains were so over-engineered that the crop had become toxic. It resounded with me due to my interests in older wheat varieties and in real bread made with them. His theory, however, was controversial.

A few days ago, Jeremy Cherfas, a fellow baker and a science and food communicator, posted a link to an article published in The Journal of Cereal Science in September 2013, with the catchy title ‘Does wheat make us fat and sick?’ While it’s not a scientific research piece in itself, it references and quotes a broad selection of studies to refute Davis’s theories.

It makes quite interesting reading. Though it also uses some language I struggled with, like “immunogenic epitopes”. So, I started writing this with the intention of succinctly summarising it. I’ve failed miserably on that front.

A few key points of refutation
Davis said modern bread wheat was “created by genetic research in the 60s and 70s” resulting in an “unnatural protein in our ‘modern wheat’ called gliadin”.

Apparently, commercially available wheat is still not GM, unless you consider millennia of selective breeding to be genetic modification.

Gliadin, meanwhile, is one of the two proteins that makes up gluten (the other is glutenin) and is present in all wheats and related species.

The article even picks on some specific pronouncements by Davis, such as “‘The proliferation of wheat products parallels the increase in waist size.'” The article’s response even manages to be almost humorous: “This statement implies that a correlation between two variables can be interpreted as a true causal relationship. It is certainly true that the increase in wheat sales has a parallel with an increase in obesity. However, there are also parallel increases in the sales of cars, mobile phones, sports shoes and the average speed of winners of the Tour de France.” Haha. Oh.

The article refutes the notion that wheat is a worse starchy food in GI terms sayaing, “However, the blood glucose response after bread consumption was lower than the response after eating the same amount of potatoes or white rice…”

It refutes Davis’s assertion that wheat can be addictive and cause withdrawal, by pointing out that although the body can create an opiate-like substance from “incomplete digestion of gliadin”, that substance simply cannot be absorbed by the gut and as such cannot get into the bloodstream or affect the nervous system.

Conversely, the article points out something that’s generally accepted among sane people: “the consumption of whole grain and whole grain fibre significantly improves blood glucose control, improves cholesterol levels, reduces blood pressure […etc]”.

So bread is still good, but only when it’s real bread made with wholegrain flour as responses are very different with “refined (white flour based) wheat bread”, which is a mealy-mouthed way of referring to that central culprit in ruining the reputation of bread as a healthy food: white sliced, the bastard child of post-war research in Chorleywood in the UK.

The article continues, “The authors conclude that the evidence regarding the relevance of refined grain and whole-grain product intake for the risk of obesity is judged as insufficient.”

Furthermore, they say, “studies show a possible relationship between whole-grain product intake and a reduced risk of obesity, a probable relationship with a lower risk of diabetes and coronary heart disease, and a convincing relationship with a reduced level of LDL cholesterol.”

The article also refers to further studies that “concluded that the intake of dietary fibre from cereals and other whole grains is associated with a reduced risk of colorectal cancer.”

The article does talk about the exceptions to these endorsements of the health benefits of wholegrain products, notably those who suffer from coeliac disease and wheat allergies, but it lost me a bit here and also disappointed in that in failed to discuss the related issue of the importance of fermentation in the production of bread, and how the biggest problem with the CWB white sliced is how it basically fails to properly ferment the dough.

An academic study done in Italy a few years ago indicated even coeliacs could digest bread if it was made properly – that is, with long fermentation. But presumably the authors of this study cannot come out straight and criticise such an important industrial food product, they just have to stick to criticising the theories of the faddish Wheat Belly.

Again, being somewhat mealy-mouthed the article said, “Wheat-containing foods prepared in customary ways and eaten in recommended amounts have been associated with numerous health benefits.” But “customary”, like “traditional”, is one of those words that’s open to interpretation. I mean, white sliced junk has been made in factories (factories – not bakeries) for more than 50 years. Does that make it a “customary way” of preparation? How long does something have to be done in a certain way to qualify as “customary”?

Conclusions
The article concludes “Arguments that the currently consumed wheat has been genetically modified resulting in adverse effects on body weight and illnesses cannot be substantiated. In particular, populations in some countries have obtained the major part of their daily energy intake from wheat-based foods for many years, such as Turkey, without reporting any detrimental effects on body weight or chronic disease.”

So ultimately the article is saying it’s nonsense that bread is fattening or intrinsically illness-inducing (for those not genetically predisposed), saying “There is no evidence that selective breeding has resulted in detrimental effects on the nutritional properties or health benefits of the wheat.”

The article doesn’t say it but I will: what’s fattening or bad for you is eating too much crap food – such as industrial white refined wheat products full of additives – and having a lazy, inert lifestyle that involves sitting on your arse too much.

You don’t need a gluten-free or faddish diet like “paleo” (nicely discussed here by Michael Pollan) to be healthy and have a suitable body mass. Just stop being a lazy sucker, get off your arse, walk or cycle to the shops, buy or make some properly fermented wholegrain real bread (ideally made with locally grown organic flour, to support your local and national economy and damage the environment less). It’s been good enough for thousands of generations of humanity – it’s good for you too.

Footnote
* Leviticus 26:26, King James Version (KJV)^{: “}And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight: and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied.”

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Filed under Uncategorized

January 20, 2014 · 5:45 pm

Cocoa and cookies

Or, “hot chocolate and biscuits”, if I’m being both more and less accurate, and true to my Britishness.

Having arrived back in Britain in the middle of the flippin’ winter, we’ve been drinking a lot of hot chocolate. Now, I’m quite fussy about my hot chocolate. So many cafes (especially those chain places) just fail straight off by serving tepid drinks that aren’t particularly chocolaty. Seriously, the description of the product is in the name: it needs to be hot, and it needs to be chocolaty.

It surprises me how long it’s taking for hot chocolate to be taken as seriously as coffee as a drink. Sure, it’s a hot milky drink, so is perhaps more of a winter drink – but having said that, most so-called coffees served by those chain places are basically just flavoured (warm, frothy) milks drinks too.

Surely hot chocolate deserves as serious attention as coffee? Single estate and all that.

I was discussing this with Michael Temple, proprietor of the Coffee House on Fisher Street in the historic heart of Lewes, East Sussex, and he agreed, mentioning that hot chocolate was popularised in Europe before coffee. Coffee spread from Asia and Africa into Europe, via the Arab world and trade through Venice, in the 16th century, with coffee houses starting to open in England in the second half of the 17th century. Chocolate – which was a bitter drink of the Aztecs – reached Spain with Cortes in 1528, and was soon developed into a sweet drink. The first chocolate house opened in England in 1657.

I’m not a coffee drinker – I’ve never enjoyed the taste of coffee – but strangely I do prefer my chocolate, and by extension, my hot chocolate, to be bitter with coffee-ish notes. (Talking of which, I’m on a side-quest to try chocolate with the highest percentage cacao; tried Mr Popple’s 88% Strong yesterday. It’s only sweetened with yacón syrup – no, I hadn’t heard of that before either – has a great, gritty crunchiness, and flavour that’s coffee-ish and sharp.)

Taking hot chocolate seriously

Michael takes his hot chocolate seriously enough to offer two types, which he calls “Italian” and “Spanish”. The former is made with (French) Valrhona and is 50% cacao. It’s very good, especially as he serves it suitably scalding. I’ve found another that pips it though, and it’s a local brand. This is Montezuma’s, a British chocolatier founded in 2000 and based just outside Chichester, West Sussex. Sure, the cacao’s not British-grown, but that doesn’t trouble my locavore inclinations too much. After all – this is chocolate we’re talking about. One’s personal ethics have to have some exceptions.

Montezuma’s do four hot chocolates at the moment, but I’m a purist so there’s only one for me: their Dark Chocolate, with 54% cacao. Years ago, I used to drink Green & Blacks, but by comparison that just seems too sweet and weak now (plus G&B sold out to Cadbury’s, who sold out to Kraft; meh). I also used to drink stuff based on an original Sir Hans Sloane recipe that they sold at the Natural History Museum, but that brand was discontinued. Then we discovered Mortimer Chocolate Company‘s 70% chocolate powder. These guys take their drinking chocolate satisfyingly seriously, talking about blend and provenance in a language not unlike that used for coffee.

In Italy, meanwhile, my favoured brand was first Venchi, then Fran found Leone, who did a 70% stoneground-coarse-granules hot chocolate. Montezuma’s comes in flakes and chunks, not granules, and is a thing of beauty, making a far superior drink to the other brand I bought recently – Clipper. Its powder form just seems oddly twee and lame in comparison to these chunky options.

Winter comforts

Drinking lots of hot chocolate is one of the great pleasures of winter, and has helped us through the past three weeks or so of largely miserable grey, wet, windy weather. It’s an even more pleasing, and comforting, experience when accompanied by some nice biscuits. So we had a little baking session. Fran did some shortbread from a Dan Lepard recipe in Short and Sweet. The results are good, though they have a little more chew than crunch.

I wanted something with a bit more snap, so I tried the Pain d’amande / Almond wafer cookies recipe in the American Academy in Rome’s Biscotti book.

As with most of the book’s recipes, it involves fairly large quantities and a fairly unclear, insufficiently tested, poorly edited recipe. Mine weren’t perfect, but dipped in hot chocolate they were yummy. They’re made with Demerara sugar, giving them a warm caramelly taste. The recipe called for slithered raw almonds but I only had flaked almonds, so used them. I think the cookies would have been better with the almond skin, so I’ll try that slicing whole almonds next time.

So anyway, here’s a recipe.

40g water
110g unsalted butter
1/2 t ground cinnamon
150g Demerara sugar
70g whole almonds, sliced into slithers. Or flaked almonds if you CBA
150g plain/all-purpose flour
Pinch of baking soda
Pinch of salt

1. Warm the water, butter, cinnamon and sugar together in a pan. Melt, don’t boil!*
2. Pour the warmed mixture into a mixing bowl and stir in the nuts.
3. Sift together the flour and baking soda, and add, along with the salt, to the mixture.
4. Combine and form a dough.
5. Shape the dough into a rectangle. You want it to be wide and flattish, about 25mm deep.
6. Wrap up the rectangle in plastic and rest in the fridge for about half an hour.
7. Preheat the oven to 160C.
8. De-fridge, de-plastic and the dough.
9. The slice rectangle across (not along) into pieces about 3mm thick.

10. Place on baking sheets lined with parchment and bake until golden. About 10 minutes.
11. Cool on a wire rack. They will crisp up as they cool.

Eat dipped in the best quality hot chocolate you can find. And made with flavoursome full-fat milk.

Now if only Montezuma’s would produce a 70%-plus hot chocolate to their range I’d love them forever. (Or at least until they sell to an ethics-free corporation. Please don’t sell out Montezuma’s!)

(Oh, and if anyone has any WordPress wherewithal – why on earth would uploading just this one image have WordPress changing it from a landscape format 1747×983 image into a portrait format 976×1747 image?)

* I’ve been corresponding with Ilse Zambonini about these almond “wafers”, which she dubbed “dentist’s joy”. When you melt the sugar and butter, don’t bring it to the boil or you could make a caramel or even a very hard toffee! Also, when you slice, make sure they’re nice and thin, and when you bake, don’t over-bake. Follow these tips, and you’ll get a biscuit that’s crisp, but not too-breaking!

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Filed under Biscuits, cookies

Tagged as biscuits, chocolate, cookies, drinking chocolate, hot chocolate, Montezuma's

January 14, 2014 · 3:39 pm

There and back again

This blog is still alive. As are we – perhaps against the odds, as Britain has had the worst winter storms for 20 years and we arrived home right in the middle of them. We touched down at Heathrow 22 December, when large swathes of our fair isle were already flooded, and repeatedly buffeted by high winds. We even managed to get down to the southwest of England on a train, then across Devon for Christmas (with no water on Xmas morning – but hey, between me, my dad on the phone and my father-in-law we fixed it), then back up the country to my folks’ place, then across to the southeast, to finally settle in Lewes, Sussex.

We haven’t got any proper internet yet, but before I even think about complaining about the two and a half week time between ordering and connection I have to remind myself it took us five months – five whole flippin’ months – to get internet in Italy’s great capital.

So in the meantime, here’s one of my last drinks on our travels, in Singapore. It’s a lager made with spirulina from RedDot (or Reddot, or Red Dot) brewery. We also visited Singapore’s other key brewery, Brewerkz, that night. It all seems like a very very long time ago, but it’s only just over three weeks.

And here’s me back in wet, wintry Blighty drinking ale (cask Old Ale, then bottled IPA) from Harvey’s, the small-ish, traditional family brewery that’s survived here in Lewes since 1790.

I’ll probably talk more about Harvey’s, but sadly I don’t think I’ll be on a brewery tour any time soon. Apparently they’re booked for two years.

Having posted those pics, however, I’m not actually drinking that much beer at the moment. My tipple of choice is currently hot chocolate, and I’ve been trying various varieties, and making biscuits to dunk in it. I’ll report back on my findings soon. Via the miracle of real – indeed fibre optic – internet. Fingers crossed the installation goes without a hitch tomorrow. Touch wood. Touch cornicello. Make inverted mano cornuta gesture. Etc. Not that I’m superstitious.

2 Comments

Filed under Ale, beer, Travelling

Tagged as Brewerkz, Harvey's, Lewes, Reddot, Singapore

December 22, 2013 · 12:08 am

High tea, post-colonial-style, at Raffles, Singapore

Last time we visited Singapore, we were arriving from India, barely recovered from a nasty dose of food poisoning garnered in the picturesque squalor of Kerala’s backwaters and were so relieved to be in this generally clean, orderly city with its reliable food hygiene. This time round we were coming from amiable, underpopulated New Zealand. We did frequent one food hall in Auckland for a bit of Asian food, but Singapore really is an amazing place for such affairs, known here as hawker centres.

I love hawker centres. For a few dollars and you can indulge in all sorts of Asian goodies – predominantly representing Singapore’s mix of Chinese, Malay and South Asian/Indian ethnic groups, but also Indonesian, Japanese, Thai and more.

Singapore really is an amazing food city.

Not that it’s all about the hawker centres though. The city boasts eating options in all price categories and styles. Indeed, our first morning we had breakfast in a place called Prego, which was a pizzeria by night and had walls covered in Italian sayings (such as “A tavola non si invecchia” – at the table, one doesn’t age). Elsewhere are fancy cake shops, restaurants with French or American-trained chefs, fusion places, and a gazillion other eateries tucked away in the endless malls, quaysides, hotels and science fiction developments. (Wandering around the Marina and some of the malls was like being in the sets for Logan’s Run or THX-1138, and entering the Marina Bay Sands – a trio of skyscrapers with what looks like a giant ship laid across the top – gave me a flashback to playing Halo 3 ODST.)

Then of course there’s the colonial heritage. Which of course means Raffles.

Named after Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826), the founder of Singapore, Raffles is the quintessential 19th century remnant of the British Empire’s endeavours in Southeast Asia. It started life as a modest harbour-side bungalow in 1887 then went on to expand into an array of white, colonnaded, neoclassical buildings that seem to cover at least an acre and, miraculously in a city of thrusting capitalistic redevelopment, managed to survive the wrecking ball purges of the 20th century.

We’d had discussions with various friends about visiting this place, but the fact that we were in a room in a modern hotel across the road, overlooking the Raffles complex, decided us that we just had to go, despite the costs. But would it be? A bar? Which bar? An evening Singapore Sling? No – it had to be high tea in the Tiffin Room.

I love afternoon tea and high tea. It’s my favourite form of party (okay, when it sprawls into the evening and some boozing that’s even better). I love to make cakes, scones and biscuits. We’ve had afternoon tea at various venues over the years, but this had to be the most storied. And certainly the most expensive. The Raffles cake stand and buffets set us back way more than the combined cost of all our other Singapore meals put together. They’d even bumped up the price about 30 per cent to celebrate Christmas. Yay.

And although the food itself wasn’t exactly the most refined – there were no fine pastries, no choux, no macaroons – it was still lovely. What you were really paying for was the venue – a beautiful high-ceilinged room – and the service – dozens of staff moving between the tables, removing your used plates to make room for another trip to the buffet, topping up your teacup so you end up consuming litres, and generally being very courteous. If slightly haphazard with their info – our first guy got his scones and mince pies mixed up, called marzipan “cookies” and flapjack “fruitcake”.

It was all good fun, though I had to restrain myself from starting to refer to the staff as “My good man” and wishing people a “Frightfully good Christmas.”

Anyway, we started with a cake rack, with white sliced bread triangular cucumber, salmon, egg etc sandwiches, crusts removed of course, mince pies (nice crusty pastry, mild mincemeat) and a white chocolate high-heeled shoe, dyed red, and filled with brandy flavoured whipped cream. Oookay. This latter didn’t seem so popular with the other diners; I felt kinda sorry for whoever laboured over them in the kitchen.

Then there were several buffets – one with dim sum, one with an array of cakes and scones, one with fruit, and even one with a variety of iced teas.

I enjoyed being able to fill up a plate with various national Christmas cakes – panettone, stollen and chocolate yule log. Fran favoured a white chocolate, rose, guava and champagne log thing. The stollen’s label had migrated several metres to the right, somehow, to beside a bowl of cream – clotted cream! Miraculous. A scone with clotted cream on the Malay Peninsula at Christmastime.
The German marzipan-filled enriched bread even inspired me to create this Christmas-cracker-worthy joke: “Where did you buy your German Christmas cake?” “I didn’t, it’s stollen.”

Too much tea perhaps…

What a fab experience.

They even had a harpist playing ‘Greensleeves’, ‘Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme,’ and ‘Here, There and Everywhere’.

The only real disappointment was the fact that they have a dress code – smart casual, shirts with collars etc – but don’t enforce it enough. Call me a snob, but spending all that money, and enjoying the opportunity to dress up a bit (as much as possible when one’s lived out of a backpack for two months), it was a bit shoddy to have people in jeans, T-shirts and trainers sitting nearby. Come on Raffles – standards! Standards!

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Filed under Cakes, Restaurants etc, Travelling

Tagged as afternoon tea, christmas, high tea, Raffles, Singapore, Tiffin Room

December 20, 2013 · 2:44 pm

The Last of New Zealand

The past week or so we’ve had a great time catching up and hanging out with old friends. Hence a bit of slackness on the blog. Plus, well, I’m aware this has really become a beer blog the past few months, and I’m slightly sick of the sound of my own (typed) voice on this subject.

That said, we’ve finally left NZ, so I wanted to write up some final thoughts on NZ craft beer, and in some ways retract some of what I said earlier.

I won’t be talking about bread and cake, though I’ve really enjoyed the baked goods of Bread and Butter, a small chain of real bakers in Auckland. Great breads, and I came to crave their almond croissants the last few days I was in town.

Strident ales
I’ll say straight away that in our final days in NZ, we finally drank some beers that had a lot of assertive hoppy character, something I’d started to begin to think didn’t exist in the craft beer scene there. Specifically, we went to a few places in Auckland that I wish I’d known about when we’d been there five weeks earlier. These places were recommended by the very genial Simon Nicholas of Hop Federation, one of the last breweries we visited on the South Island.

Simon was the head brewer at Hallertau, the Auckland brewery whose beers we’d enjoyed at The Golden Dawn on Ponsonby Road. He had recently relocated to the South Island, buying up the former Monkey Wizard microbrewery in Riwaka, outside Motueka in Tasman.

This small operation was previously run as a hobby by an English dentist, so Simon was in the midst of transforming the place into a full-time serious operation, and was also in the midst of tinkering with the beers he was developing. It was a really pleasure to chat with him and enjoy the beers he kept saying he was still “mucking about with”. Frankly, they were all superb already, but I’ll be interested to go back when he’s satisfied with them. (Or, ideally, find a few bottles at a decent beer pub in Britain, like London’s Cask Pub & Kitchen.)

His Red IPA was his biggest success so far, and it was delicious. He called it a “bit of a muck about”, but this lovely dark amber beer is sharp and resiny smelling, and has a great balanced taste from dry hopping with Simcoe and Cascade hops and mellowing it with Gladfield malt from Canterbury.

Hop shortage
He said he wanted to make it with exclusively NZ hops, but they just weren’t available – indeed, he explained despite the Motueka area’s fame for hop-growing (something that was affirmed in a mid-19th century painting we saw in the Nelson museum), half a decade or so ago many were pulled out and replaced with jazz apple orchards. Just when NZ hops were becoming even more in demand in the international craft brewing scene. Ooops.

“There’s a worldwide hop shortage for our hops – it’s a real shame,” he said. Furthermore, as hops are all centrally controlled in NZ, it’s not even possible to grow your own adjacent to your brewery.

Before leaving the South Island we visited Bays Brewery near Nelson Airport, which was more traditional than craft (for example, they pasteurise and filter, like McCashin’s; Simon wrinkled his nose at the very idea of this. Indeed, why make a product that’s carbonated by an organism then kill that organism?) and Golden Bear in Mapua.

The latter has an American brewer, so I was intrigued to chat with them, as US craft beer tastes seem very unlike those of NZ, but when we arrived on a beautiful summer evening, there was a gig and a lively crowd in their brewpub, so that wasn’t really on the cards. Their Seismic IPA wasn’t bad though.

Though TBH, I enjoyed a bit of the Mussel Inn’s Captain Cooker manuka at the café just over the yard from the brewery more. That was one the few beers I mentioned on my old blog during our previous visit to NZ back in 2007.

Back in the big sprawl
So yes, Auckland. When we got back, we first had a few days staying at the Piha bach (Kiwi English for holiday home) of our friends Jude and Roger. I bought a few beers to take with me, and was tricked by yet more “faux craft” branding. This was Hancock & Co, whose branding emphasised a whole yarn dating back to the mid-19th century; in reality, the brand is actually new, created by an off-license chain and exploiting some NZ brewing heritage. (See here.)

This wasn’t a trap one could fall into at Brothers Beer though. This was the place recommended by Simon: a small brewery close to the town centre in a funky development called City Works Depot.

The brewery has been in operation for about a year, according to the slightly unfriendly girl serving, whose too-cool-for-school attitude contrasted with the friendliness of most of the brewery folk we met on our South Island road trip (3095km – god help me. There go the last tatters of my green credentials when combined with all these aviation crimes).

She warmed up a bit when we got chatting more about beer. We had a tastling padddle of five of their brews. Alongside their own beers – brewed, with a cloud of malty mashy odours, right there – they had some representation from other breweries, like Yeastie Boys (based in Wellington). The venue also has some slightly sagging shelves laden with bottles of genuine craft beer – so no Hancock’s, Boundary Road or Founders and plenty of Mike’s, Parrot Dog, Townsend’s, Invercargill Brewery and 8 Wired etc, and even some overseas stuff like Speakeasy, which we’d had in its native San Francisco.

Brothers’ beers proved something of a relief and a revelation. When we were in Auckland before, other than Hallertau at The Golden Dawn, we’d struggled to find any decent craft beer on tap. Here, though, was a brilliant selection – and not only that, some of them were fantastically dry and bitter, displacing our experiences of so many mild-mannered, she’ll-be-right malty lagers and under-hopped ostensible IPAs. Yay. Flipping yay.

So their El Dorado IPA (6.7%) came with a scent of ginger and lemon, and a big-bodied taste of hoppiness, and a dry mouthfeel. Their Aramis pale ale (5.3%) had a smell and taste that was both minerally and yeasty, reminiscent of Marmite, along with a bitter-sweet balance of hop and malts. Surprisingly, the one we liked best was their Gronholm Imperial Pils (8%). I’m really not a fan of lagers, pils and pilsners generally but this was a really complex beer. Fran said, its odour was of “something very green – peas? Smells amazing.” I got grapefruit and a real astringency akin to tea tree or eucalyptus essential oils. Fran also said it had a “Strong male sweat thing”, which might sound off-putting, but it really worked. Big, bitter and delicious.

No blimmin’ NZ draught mild brown lager here.

Though I’d still say their taps are pouring a little cold. And they need some hand pumps.

The latter we found at our next Auckland port of call, another recommendation from Simon: Vulture’s Lane, a pub on Vulcan Lane, just off the unprepossessing Queen Street in downtown Auckland. Why didn’t I find this place before?! Guidebooks and Google both failed me.

They had a great selection, including yet more breweries I’d not even heard of before: like Hot Water Brewing Co, a new outfit in the Coromandel (close to the famed, freaky Hot Water Beach) and Behemoth Brewing Company. We had a golden ale from each, Golden Steamer Ale and Chur. I had to have the latter as the label was cool; it was delicious too, even, crisp and fresh, sweet, bit of hop, resin. A really nice, balanced summer ale.

Finally and farewell
My final few bottles of NZ beer before our departure were a Taranaki Pale Ale, from Mike’s, which Kelly at Green Man in Dunedin had mentioned as NZ’s only other organic brewery currently, and Scallywag Rich Amber Ale, from Schipper’s, in Auckland.

The latter I had to buy as it had another cool label that not only reflected the great dog company we’ve had on this trip (notably, in a bit of utterly coincidental alliteration, from Baxter, Bandit and Betty) but even listed all the hop varieties, malts and even the yeast used in the brew – what an excellent touch, for an excellent beer, a sweet, deep, rich, crisp ruddy brew that’s not unlike Hop Federation’s Red IPA.

Now we’ve gone I wish I’d had more time, and more prior knowledge, and someone to share the driving with.

Never mind.

We’re in Singapore now, enjoying the monsoon, and having a day off the booze to help with the jetlag. Though I do hope to get to Brewerkz and Red Dot (Reddot?) before we head on home to Blighty for Christmas.

Nelson – small town big beer city

I love the city of Nelson, in Tasman Bay at the top of NZ’s South Island. It has a cathedral and a royal edict, so it can call itself a city, but really it’s just a quiet small town.

When I lived in NZ in my mid-twenties, it was where I came for a break from the intensity of the sandfly infested, bush-clad hills and cliffs of the Buller Gorge, with its reliable rains and very short window of sunlight opportunity in the winter. The sun always seemed to shine in Nelson. And indeed, when we drove up on Sunday night, after two days of torrential downpours on the West Coast and in the Buller, the clouds parted.

We’d had a lovely, though brief visit to the farm and old friends I used to live with, and we even managed an Italian-ish lunch, with pizza, caponata (south Italian artichoke stew) and carciofi alla romana (Roman-style artichokes; though without the Romanesco artichokes, it was a little challenging) but as we don’t have that much time on this trip, we wanted to move on: to Nelson, with its claim of being the Craft Brewing Capital of NZ, and its dozen or so breweries. And population of not much more than 50,000; my home town has 35,000 people and a big fat zero breweries.

Clear skies, empty stomach, free house
The clearing skies of Nelson were a welcome sight though. I dreamed of dry shoes and, enthused, we rushed out and started drinking beer. I thought the lunch would see us through, but my stomach was actually rather empty and the beer caught up with me. Oops.

Still, the venue was fantastic. The Free House is an ex-church on Collingwood Street in Nelson. Enter via a gate, past a large yurt (for events), and there’s the little chapel, with rendered walls and corrie iron roof.

It was a quiet Sunday evening, and the place reminded us a little of the village halls of our generation’s coming-of-age discos. Except for the giant cockroach sculptures on the wall. And the beer: 10 keg taps, three handpumps.

Stephen, the guy serving, said they’d been going since 2009 – so a few years after our last visit. The handpumps – which, he says are getting “more and more, more and more” attention from drinkers more used to the bubbles of kegs – were at this time all dedicated to Townsends, a independent local brewery, founded in 2005 and using Nelson hops and 25,000 year old water, “drawn up from over half a kilometre under the Moutere Valley Clay.”

We tried their JC IPA, which had nice resin, citrus, pine smells but a fairly mellow, malty taste. Nice medium body, but pretty minimal bitter crispness – a bit too mild for my idea of an IPA. Also Sutton Hoo, an “American amber ale” which was very rich and smooth.

When I asked Stephen for the most assertive beer they had on, he gave me a Volcano Red from Mata Brewery on the North Island. Fran also tried Mata’s Black Brew Stout. Both were great, but the former was 7% and really got me on the aforementioned empty stomach.

Brewing founders
The next day, my beer cravings had abated somewhat. So we first focussed on food, and culture. We visited a great Nelson bakery, the Swedish Bakery at 54 Bridge Street, and had some quality pastries for breakfast.

After some museum action, we headed out to Founders Heritage Park, a kind of Truman Show set with old NZ buildings, few hundred metres of train line, a recreation of a windmill, and a brewery, also called Founders.

It’s a brewery that’s been relaunched this year with some great artwork, but the standard of the branding made me a bit suspicious, as did the blurb’s insistence on saying things like “Spanning over 6 generations and almost twice as many brewers, Founders has been brewing beer in Nelson for almost 160 years”.

Indeed, dig a little deeper and it becomes clear there hasn’t exactly been 160 years of continuous, independent brewing. Indeed, from 1969 to 1999, they were owned by DB (one of the two big NZ brands). Between 1999 and 2012 they did seem to be an indie, at Founders Park and the “First fully certified organic brewery in the Southern Hemisphere and only one of six in the world.” In 2012, however, they sold to Boundary Road Brewery, which is itself part of the so-called Independent Liquor Group, which is part of Japanese drinks giant Asahi.

We did a taster of their six current brews and while they were all nice enough (albeit on tap and served too cold), some bordered on bland and the 2009 IPA was again a case of not enough hop bitterness.

Later on, we went to the State Cinema (where I’ve been seeing films since 1994), which has a pizzeria, Stefano’s, where the pizzaiolo is dubbed “The King of Pizza”. Maybe him and Rome’s Gabriele Bonci need a pizza-off. Stefano’s looked pretty awesome, though we’d just eaten elsewhere so didn’t sample.

After a film, we did managed one more beer (a half each) from one of the ever-increasing number of Sprig & Fern outlets. This is another Nelson small brewery brand, that is slowly but surely expanding, to Wellington, to Auckland. I tried their IPA, which was pleasant enough, but lacking in the hoppy bitterness. Again.

Return of the Mc
As I’ve said several times recently on this blog, between the ages of about 18 and 24, I didn’t drink, put off booze by bad 1980s corporate lager, which dominated the pubs of my teenage years. It was NZ’s Black Mac, a kind of schwarzbier (black lager), that subsequently got me interested in beer. So I felt I had to go to the new McCashin family brewery.

Terry McCashin, who first started brewing Mac’s beers in 1981 had sold his brewery – which really kicked off NZ craft beer – to Lion Nathan in 1999, killing its craft credentials. In 2009, though, his son, Dean, moved back into their original premises, the 1950s Rochdale Cider factory in Stoke, just outside Nelson, and started brewing again, as a fully NZ-owned operation.

Bravo. Kinda convoluted. But bravo.

The brewery has a great café and woman at the bar who greeted us was charming. The guy who guided us and five others was sweet too, though he didn’t introduce himself and seemed to struggle when questions took things off-script. He did have an interesting take on how to define “craft beer” though – “a craft will adhere to the materials – water, yeast, hops and malt”. So while industrial brewers can and do add sugars, craft brewers rely on the complex sugars from the malts.

He talked about how the brewery is producing beer (under the ‘Stoke’ brand), ciders, wine and is even embarking on vodka and whisky distilling. They also contract brew: we watched Moa bottles coming off the bottling and pasteurising line.

Yes, they filter and pasteurise. They also add CO2. The guide said the gas was to please the Kiwi taste for fizzier beer, but this seems to contradict what Stephen of the Free House was saying about their hand pumps. Plus, the guide also said that without pasteurisation beer wouldn’t have the longevity (“Lucky to get two weeks”), but this is contradicted by hundreds of traditional and craft brewers the world over who are bottle conditioning with live yeasts.

After a wander round the brewery, we tasted about a dozen Stoke beers. Now clearly these guys know their beer and know the beer business, but several of them seem fairly similar – mellow, malty, bubbly, not much in the way of bitterness or strong hoppiness.

Their most popular and garlanded beer, the Stoke Amber, is a really pleasant summer beer, but doesn’t have much character beyond a nice colour and a slightly strawberry smell. Their Lager, Pilsner and Gold are all fairly similar, and their Stoke IPA isn’t far off – it’s too mild to really stand out as an IPA. (Again.)

They do have more interesting beers, like the Cirrus Wheat, with its big banana smell and taste, and Smokey Ale, with its overtones of bacon-flavoured crisps or even kippers, and their Double Pale Ale finally has a bit of bitterness (it’s dry-hopped), but all in all, I found their wares a little underwhelming.

But then maybe nothing they could do would hold up against my memories of my 24-year-old self’s first revelatory experience of a rigger of Black Mac, filled up in a rough Murchison pub and drunk on the veranda of my friends’ place in the Buller.

So we drove on, leaving the other Stoke breweries – Lighthouse, Bays – for another day. Thankfully, on our way around Tasman Bay we went to another brewery, which really restored our faith in the NZ beer scene. But this post is getting far too long, and the view outside is far too splendid to ignore, so I’ll save that for another day.

Right, I’m off to see some glowworms.

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Filed under New Zealand beer, Travelling

Tagged as Founders, McCashin's, Nelson, New Zealand, Sprig & Fern, The Free House

December 9, 2013 · 8:41 am

The long way round to whitebait pizza

Whitebait fritter is a classic NZ dish. In the season – or all year round if you catch enough and freeze them – whitebait is mixed with egg and fried up like a fishy omelette. Done well, it’s delicious. Done badly, well, it’s a bit of a pointless slaughter of many little fishies. And added to a pizza, well that’s a whole different story, and one we encountered this evening.

This morning, we left Mount Cook/Aoraki and headed for the South Island’s wild and woolly West Coast. Although Mount Cook is only about 50km from the coast as the crow flies, by combustion engine it’s more like 500km plus.

Cars can’t really manage the bloody great glaciated mountain range, you see. You have to drive all the way out from Mount Cook Village’s dead end highway, then east, then northeast towards Christchurch, then finally northwest and west over Arthur’s Pass, an impressive route that saddles at 920m. Alternatively, we’d have had to backtrack to Wanaka in the south, then loop up north over the Haast Pass. Either way is a mission. But Fran was determined to go to Hokitika – she’s reading Eleanor Catton’s award-winning, 832 page novel The Luminaries, which is set in this West Coast town in its 1860s gold-rush days.

It was a great journey though. We left our hostel, visited one last, epic glacier (Tasman), then drove out along the massive glaciated valley, past bright blue lakes, hydro projects, and onto the Canterbury Plains, along very English, or even French, avenues of poplars, oaks and willows. Through alpine tussock grasslands, past the incredible rock formations of Flock Hill and Kura Tawhiti, aptly named Castle Hill in English, past various ski areas, and then we got back to some areas that hadn’t been deforested for sheep stations.

Arthur’s Pass, and the descent toward the West Coast is precipitous in places, an amazing route, surrounded by peaks and native forest, frequently by keas (NZ’s unique alpine parrot) but not always entirely fun when the inevitable speeding local in a 4WD tries to chase you at 100kmh around every sharp bend marked with a 45kmh sign.

En route, we stopped at Geraldine, famed for a Bayeux Tapestry replica made with sewing machine needles (or somesuch). We didn’t check it out, concerned about our timing, but did eat a few idiosyncratic Kiwi snacks like a pinwheel, a savoury bun stuffed with cream cheese and red pepper, and citrus slice, a kinda of granola bar whose health benefits were undone by a thick layer of lemony icing. We also bought a few beers from the nearby Valley Brewing Co, a double hopped Pale Ale and Muster Red Ale (“Local barley and Nelson hops”), which we’re enjoying now.

The culinary highlight of the day, and indeed of the last week, however, was the abovementioned whitebait pizza. Rome’s renowned pizzaiolo Gabriele Bonci has opened my eyes to new levels of pizza inventiveness (with seasonal delights like Brussels’ sprouts and mortadella) but even he didn’t prepare me for this.

The venue was Hokitika’s Fat Pipi Pizza, and this is their signature dish. The full 26 inch version supposedly includes a quarter pound (114g) of whitebait. I had the slightly more modest 20 inch, which still featured a serious amount of whitebait fritter, combined with mozzarella, capers and parsley, and served with lemon wedges. It was delicious. The capers and lemon cut through any fattiness from the cheese and egg, while the fish offered some slightly salty protein, care of the Hokitika River.

Tomorrow we plan to visit some of the remarkable old gold workings in the Hokitika Gorge, but in the meantime, we’re enjoying sitting in a hotel room, digesting pizza and feeling vaguely threatened by the sea. The room was going cheap, as recent storms have been trying to scour away the beach, and by extension the town, and apparently we’ll be woken by diggers working at low tide tomorrow morning trying to shore the place up. No matter, it’s still a delight to be listening to the waves a mere 20m away, and watching a line of sunset brightness slicing through the grey cloud.

Addendum
Whitebait is a big deal in Hoki. The town’s history museum dedicates about a third of its space to whitebait, including a lot of blurb from Booker-winning author Keri Hulme (The Bone People), who says “she’s not particularly serious about anything except whitebaiting.”

Oh, and months later, after Fran had finally had a chance to look at her pics, I found this. I don’t look quite convinced at this point:

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Filed under Cakes, New Zealand beer, Pizza, Travelling

Tagged as Geraldine, Hokitika, Valley Brewing Co, whitebait, whitebait pizza

December 5, 2013 · 8:58 am

Round the bottom of Down Under, and to its highest point

We’re currently in Aoraki/Mount Cook Village, the cluster of accommodation, Department of Conservation (DOC) buildings and an aggregates operation that lies just down the magnificent, glacier-carved valley from the mountain – “Cloud Piercer” in the Maori – that is New Zealand’s highest, at 3,754m (12,316 feet).

We arrived yesterday lunchtime and as the room in our slightly shambolic hostel wasn’t ready, we headed up to the DOC visitor centre and the Hermitage, a version of which has been hereabouts since 188something (first incarnation destroyed when a glacial lake broke its moraine and flooded, second in a fire in 1957) and providing succour to generations of climbers, hikers and bus loads of Japanese tourists. We had a pizza on their balcony. The pizza was nothing to write home about, but you couldn’t argue with the view of old Cloud Piercer. Thankfully not too shrouded. Friends had warned us it’s very commonplace to visit here and never actually see the peek for the clouds.

After my last post, we had another day in Dunedin, and visited Green Man – which is not only possibly the last independent, New Zealand-owned brewery in town, it’s one of only two organic breweries in NZ. (The other is Mike’s in Taranaki.) It also uses a foliate head as its logo, which is cool, especially for an Old World kid like me who used to enjoy spotting them in England’s great cathedrals and chapter houses.

Looming large over Dunedin is the Speight’s brewery. The brand, which was established in 1876, still pushes its tradition and heritage, but, like so many NZ companies, it was bought out. And like so many NZ beer brands this means it was bought out by Lion, part of Kirin, part of Mitsubishi. We toyed with a brewery visit, but didn’t really have the time. Possibly a shame, as I’d composed a load of questions to ask the guide about how the production, and the nature of the product, has changed over the decades, especially with becoming part of such a conglomerate.

Really Kiwi
A visit to Green Man was far more rewarding, as the guy there, Kelly, gave us plenty of his time, and we went away armed with several of their brews. They have a core range of six brews: a Czech Pilsner, a Premium Lager, a Schwarzbier (which I’m drinking now – fairly mild, bit metallic, but sweet and refreshing), an alcoholic ginger beer (which I found a bit acrid), a Tequila Beer (lager, lime) and an IPA (which was pretty good – more robust and flavoursome than many NZ beers I’ve been trying). In summer, they also do a wheat beer and Cyclist, a shandy (or a “radler,” as it’s known in NZ – except that name’s been part of a controversy when someone, mentioning no names, tried to copyright it). Kelly said they’re also working on a cider and a bock aged in whisky oak.

It sounds like it’s been a difficult year though – not only do they only have only four hop varieties to choose from due to the limits of organic production, there was also a bad summer last year that resulted in a general shortage.

It was a great brewery, with its open fermenters and open attitude, and a relief in the face of all the corporate and no-longer-NZ that seems to dominate here. Kelly even gave us a recommendation for a pub. The Octagon, Dunedin’s centre, has a Macs (ie Mitsubishi) pub and a Monteith’s (ie Asia Pacific Breweries) pub, but it was trickier to find actually NZ beer. Kelly pointed us towards the Albar, which not only had a couple of beers from Cassels and Sons (The Alchemist, a citrussy pale ale, and Milk Stout, a stout with a lot of dark fruit syrup and charcoal) a craft brewery in Christchurch, they were even on handpump and kept at the right temperature! The barman (Scots) said the Kiwis “just don’t understand” about keeping beer at the right temperature. These were the best pints we’d had so far in NZ, I reckon – not too cold, not too gassy.

The true South Island
After Dunedin, we headed on down to Stewart Island – a decidedly not summery, magical place, and as far south as we’d been not just in NZ, but ever. Really right round the bottom of down under. The signpost at Bluff, where you get the Stewart Island ferry, said London was 19,000km (11,800 miles) away. (We had visited the equivalent signpost at the top of the North Island six years ago.)

I believe it used to have a brewery, but now the pub only served Speight’s – dull, generic and far too cold, especially when served in glasses that were kept in the fridge! Still, the Sunday night pub quiz was a blast after we’d done some hikes in the Antarctic winds and surprising sunshine. We – me and Fran, a Scots couple, a young Californian orthnithologist (who even managed to see a kiwi) and our hostel host, Jacqui (who was Welsh-Scots with an Irish boyfriend, NZ employment and a unique accent) even managed to come fourth out of 16 teams. If only we’d guessed the Wallace and Gromit clue!

Drinkable Lager Shock!
After Stewart Island we had a few nights in Wanaka, a rapidly growing, temperate town in Central Otago – an area defined by the rapid introduction of British style sheep farming, the ensuing deforestation highlighting the drama of the local mountains. I hiked up one (Roys Peak, that is a peak of many Roys, not a peak of one possessive Roy) and I’m still feeling it a few days later.

After my hike, we treated ourselves to a few beers, then a curry with a lake view. The beers were from Wanaka Beer Works, which is just outside town at the airport. The brewery only seems to produce lagers, which puts me off slightly, as I prefer bottom to top fermented beers, but actually their Cardrona Gold “All Malt Lager”, named after a high hill pass outside town, is pleasant, one of the few drinkable lagers I’ve had. (Even though it’s a variation on the classic “NZ Draught” formula – see below.)

Wanaka also boasts not one but two idiosyncratic independent cinemas. Our friend Benny had recommend Cinema Paradiso, but it was all booked for an event, so we went to Rubys (which I assume is actually “Ruby’s”), a great place on the edge of town that has an atmospheric lounge bar – a great spot for a cocktail, glass of wine, or beer. I had an IPA from Three Boys, a brewery in Christchurch. It was served too cold, in a cold glass, and was more malt than hop, but was a pleasant amber, fruity ale.

She’ll be right
So now we’re spending our second night in Aoraki/Mount Cook Village, parked up. As Designated Driver, I crave these moments where I can put the car keys down and actually enjoy some of the bottles we’ve been collecting along the way. The past few evenings, this has included a couple from Invercargill Brewery, both of which I found a bit metallic, as well as several Green Mans and even a few from Brew Moon still.

To be honest, as much as I’m enjoying visiting these breweries and sampling their wares, I’m a little disappointed by NZ craft beer. NZ changed how I feel about beer back in 1994, but now it’s changing how I feel about NZ beer. So much of it, even the craft beer, feels like it’s pulling its punches. Are NZ beer drinkers really so afraid of more body, more robust flavour, bigger hop hits? So afraid of anything other than cold pale lagers and pilsners and, more specifically, cold, too cold, “NZ draught” (a mildly malty, minimally hoppy amber or brown lager, like Tui, Canterbury Draught, DB Draught and Speight’s Gold Medal Ale, which isn’t really an ale).

So many of the beers, aside from being served too cold, are just so generic and mild-mannered, the liquid expression of the easy-going “She’ll be right” attitude. I’m really hoping that during our last few weeks here we’ll discover some feistier beers. In the meantime, I think Brew Moon and Garage Project might be my favourites so far. But I’m craving those big flavours, like the APAs we were finding in the US before we came here. Come on NZ, you have just great hops, so many skilled breweries, let’s have some attitude!

[PS – someone give me some real WiFi please. Another blog brought to you after hours of wailing and gnashing of teeth.]

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Filed under New Zealand beer, Travelling

Tagged as Aoraki, Brew Moon, Dunedin, Green Man Brewery, Mount Cook, Speight's, Stewart Island