The smallest grains in the world

Ok, so I’m waving my arm around madly, but I reckon I’m probably in a minority here.

The thing is that I love Ethiopian food, which largely centres around injera, a pancake/bread that is traditionally made using fermented teff, and this has led me to do a little bit of research.

Umm, teff?

So called because teffa (ጠፋ) means lost in Amharic, and teff happens to be the smallest grain in the world, at about 0.8mm, with about 150 seeds weighing the same as onea kernel of wheat.

Teff is similar to quinoa, but because the grain is smaller it takes a shorter time to cook. Teff is gluten free, and is also super high in fibre, has more calcium than milk, and twice as much iron as wheat or barley.

I’m really not a fan of the term ‘super food’ but if there are such things, then this is surely a strong contender.

It’s a traditional crop in the highlands of Ethiopia, but it’s tricky, labour intensive and time consuming to grow, which means that most Ethiopians can’t afford to make injera from pure teff and end up mixing it with other forms of flour. Despite the fact that Ethiopia is an ancient civilisation, and this is really quite an ancient crop, we in the more affluent ‘first world’, who could all afford it have somehow not managed to hear of teff until very recently.

Nowadays though it is also being grown in Europe, the US, Australia, and South Africa, and whilst not exactly cheap is definitely affordable. It’s not the easiest thing to get your hands on, but you could try your local health food shop, or a quick Google will provide plenty of mail order options.

I can’t really recommend any suppliers in other markets, but in the UK you can get it from Innovative Solutions for a reasonable price.

And what would I do with it?

Apart from the obvious answer of make injera (recipe coming here soon), there are a surprising number of things that you might choose to do with teff. Grains are versatile, and teff is no exception, once ground down into a flour you can use it to make pastries, pancakes, breads and cakes.

You can also sprinkle it onto a bread, as you would poppy seeds or sesame seeds, throw it into a vegetable stir fry, or make a porridge out of it.

I haven’t experimented with nearly enough teff based recipes yet, but I’m planning on trying a lot more in the very near future.

How big are these?

Since I’m not any kind of master baker this normally involves a recipe, and this is where the egg problem arises. Unlike most areas of culinary craft, where you can get by with a reasonable set of taste-buds, a bit of heart and a mere sprinkling of technical knowhow, baking is an exact science where changing quantities and ratios has a huge effect on the end results.

It’s easy enough to look through a book or hop onto Google and find a million recipes, and I have enough basic mathematical knwledge (and conversion charts) to muddle my way through ounces, grams, cups, sticks, or whatever other odd meausurements a recipe might decide to throw at me.

What, until recently, I had not thought to do however is to change the amount of eggs that I used depending on where the recipe came from. You (or at least I) would just assume that a large egg is a large egg, but you couldn’t be more wrong.

Globilisation and standarisation are constantly making our world smaller and bridging differences between cultures and societies, but it seems that this does not extend to eggs.

The difference between a large egg in London and a large egg in New York is not just the 5500km that separates them, but also about 10 grams, and if we wanted to compare it to a large egg in Australia then it all changes again.

If you are only using one egg in a recipe then it really doesn’t make all that much difference, but if you are using four or five then those differences start to add up.

So, for anybody out there who might be bothered by the whole egg size issue and wants to calculate how much egg should be going into their baked delights, I’ve put together this handy little chart showing the difference in egg sizes in different places.

Note: This chart only works for chicken eggs, duck and goose eggs have their own completely non-standardised sizing systems.

If you are using a very old recipe then you might find that you have egg sizes specified by a number. These are ‘traditional’ egg sizes, and I’m going to include a little table of these as well. Partially for completeness, and partially because I love old recipe books, and they come in handy.

Parsley - Note! non curliness

The Italians use a lot of parsley, and they don’t use curly leaf.

The French use a lot of parsley, and they don’t use curly leaf.

Every well regarded chef you care to ask about parsley doesn’t use curly leaf.

Curly leaf parsley doesn’t taste of parsley, it doesn’t taste of anything. It’s terrible.

Still, somehow it happens that it’s in every shop, and somebody must be buying the bloody stuff.

Whoever you are, STOP IT!

It merits a place in my affections right next to iceberg lettuce, another flavourless thing that is used because of the way that it looks.

Good garnish though?

I’ve heard people justify the use of curly leaf parsley with the fact that it is pretty and makes a good garnish. Maybe it is pretty, but I’m of the opinion that anything on the plate should be there for taste value, and that if it happens to look good then that is an additional bonus.

Curly leaf parsley and iceberg lettuce don’t merit inclusion on any plate for taste value, no matter how green and pretty they look.

In the garden

Flat leaf parsley on the other hand is great, and I use it all of the time for all sorts of things, so I like to have plenty to hand.

I am by no stretch of the imagination a gardener, but I love having fresh herbs outside to pick at and chop up as needed.

We grow plenty of parsley (not curly obviously) and I love to rip a load out just a few days after it has broken through the soil and use it as a microherb. The little baby parsley has so much flavour, it tastes young and fresh, and it looks fantastic with an amazing vivacity of colour.

It’s also worth remembering that while the leaves are pretty, it is actually the stalks that have the most flavour, so chop them finely and throw them into things as well.

It's far sexier than it looks.

What you might not know is that beetroot crops up in mythology and legend all over the place.

You probably also don’t realise that beetroots are all about sex and love.

Here then, in absolutely no particular order at all, are ten things that you may or may not have know about the red veg much beloved by Central and Eastern Europe.

1. Eating a lot of beetroot turns your pee pink/red, eating more makes your poo pink as well.

2. The Lupanare – official brothel of Pompeii (the brothel still stands, despite the best efforts of Vesuvius in 79AD), has its walls adorned with pictures of beetroots, amongst the frescoes of people busy at it.

3. You can use beetroot juice to measure acidity. When added to an acidic solution it turns pink, but when it is added to an alkali it turns yellow.

4. The Oracle at Delphi (Greek mythology, not software companies) claimed that beetroot was second only in mystical potency to horseradish, and that it was worth its weight in silver.

5. Betanins – the natural red coularants in beetroot, are used in the food industry to colour a number of other things as well, they help to make the red redder in tomato pastes, various sauces, jams, and even ice cream.

6. To “take favors in the beetroot fields” was a popular euphemism for visiting prostitutes in the early 20th century.

7. Beetroot contains betaine, which in other forms is used to help treat depression, and trytophan, the feel good chemical in chocolate.

8. In many cultures the belief persists that if a man and a woman eat from the same beetroot then they will fall in love.

9. If you boil beetroots in water, and then massage the water into your scalp each night, it works as an effective cure for dandruff.

10. In 1975, during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, cosmonauts from the USSR’s Soyuz 19 welcomed the Apollo 18 astronauts by preparing a banquet of borscht (beetroot soup) in zero gravity.

Anyone for roulette?

Os pementos de Padrón, uns pican e outros non. – Padrón peppers, some are hot and some are not.

Pementos de Padrón (Padrón peppers) are normally mild manners little things, but every so often you get a spicy one. Nobody seems to agree on how often the hot ones crop up, I’ve read and been told everything from 1 in 10, to 1 in 50.

I must have eaten in excess of a hundred of these yummy little green peppers, and I only bit into my first spicy one yesterday. When you do get one they are quite hot, although not excessively. I found that in addition to the heat they are really very bitter.

If you want the technical bit, the heat of the pepper varies according to the level of capsaicin. This varies naturally, but the peppers grown later in the season seem to be slightly more piquant than the earlier ones.

A bit of history

Monks. They make wine, beer, Chartreuse and Benedictine. They make great cheeses and bake bread, and in addition to all of this they introduced lovely little Padróns to Spain from South America in the 16th century.

Fransiscan monks brought the pepper seeds back from their travels, and began to grow them in the gardens of the convent in the village of Herbón.

Herbón is in the district of Padrón (hence the name), in Galicia, and the weather conditions and very fertile soil in the region quickly proved to be perfect for growing the peppers. The Padróns were an immediate hit with locals, and the monks began to cultivate them in earnest and trade the peppers for whatever else they needed.

Skipping forward about 400 years, and the valley around Herbón is still the world centre of Padrón growing, but it is no longer the monks doing the hard work. The locals have been growing them for generations, and despite the adoption of modern technology, they are still largely grown using the traditional methods.

Nowadays Padrón peppers are grown all over the place, most notably in the US, and in Australia, but the best still come from Galicia. In Spain and Portugal they cost bugger all, and not a huge amount more in the UK and the rest of Europe, but further afield they are expensive.

Nutritional Stuff

As with all nutritional information and health benefits, how good (or bad) something is for you depends entirely on who you ask, or which survey you read, but Padrón peppers seem to come out pretty well.

FACT: They contain vitamin A, B1, B2, C and P, as well as plenty or protein, calcium and iron.

MAYBE: They might reduce blood pressure, help scars heal faster, and work as an aphrodisiac.

What to do with them

The traditional Galician way to eat them is incredibly simple, and you’ll find them prepared in this way in tapas bars all across Spain and Portugal.

1. Put some olive oil into a frying pan and heat it to a high temperature (until it is just starting to smoke)

2. Throw the Padróns into the pan whole and fry them, turning occasionally, until all of the skin has started to blister on all sides.

3. Sprinkle them with a generous amount of sea salt, and serve.

They taste great when paired with Ribiero, a young Galician white wine, or with Txakoli, a similar Basque wine.

You can also stuff them with cheese and bake them, or use them in any variety of recipes. Check out the recipe section for some coming soon.

It is as odd as it looks!

It would be reasonably easy to write a whole book, albeit a small one, containing things that most people probably don’t know about pineapples.

I don’t think anyone would buy the book though, so we’ll just keep it down to these 10 interesting (I think) facts.

1. There are a lot of foods that affect the taste of your seminal or vaginal fluids, but pineapple is one of the strongest. Eating a lot of pineapple makes you taste sweeter, and less ‘fishy’.

2. When you cut up a pineapple at home, you normally chuck the skin, core and ends in the bin. The pineapple canning industry doesn’t though, these bits are used for making alcohol, vinegar and animal feed.

3. Each pineapple plant only produces just one pineapple per year.

4. Unripe pineapples don’t just taste vile, but can actually be quite poisonous. Eating it causes serious throat irritation and it has a strong laxative effect.

5. Pineapples grow slowly, and can take up to two years to reach full size, so we pick and eat them when they are much smaller, but if they are left to their own devices they can reach up to 9kg (20lbs).

6. If you want to speed up the ripening of a pineapple, so that you can eat it faster, then you can do it by standing it upside down (on the leafy end).

7. Traditionally pineapple juice was used as a diuretic and to induce labour.

8. The Bromelain enzyme in pineapples breaks down proteins. This means that you can use pineapple or pineapple juice as a meat tenderiser.

9. The same Bromelain enzyme means that you can’t put fresh pineapple in jelly, because it breaks down the gelatine. You can stop this from happening by boiling the chunks of pineapple in their juice or in water for a few minutes, or you can use canned pineapple.

10. In case you find yourself on a sailing trip in the tropics without any Ajax, you might like to know that pineapple juice mixed with sand is very good for cleaning boat decks and machete blades.

Be quick, you've only got 6 weeks

As always with seasonal articles, this applies to Europe. If you happen to be in Australia, then obviously your seasons are going to be a bit different.

We all know the arguments for and against eating seasonally by now, so instead of going over all of that again, here is a list of a few of the wonderful things that are fresh and in season in May.

Asparagus

The asparagus season is incredibly short, in the UK it lasts for about 6 weeks from the end of April through to the middle of June. Outside of the season you can buy asparagus imported from all over the place, or canned, but given the fact that it tastes absolutely nothing like the real thing, it’s really not worth it.

Some people seem to become really quite aroused by asparagus, but I find I can’t get that excited over it. I do like it though, and when it is in season then it is great served as an accompaniment to simple grilled or roasted meat or fish.

Cherries

The cherry season is just starting in May, and the first few weeks they will be slightly bland and hideously expensive. The great thing is that they will get juicier, sweeter and cheaper by the week. By the middle of May, they will already be very good, and throughout the next two months they are just going to get better.

Cherries are incredibly versatile, you can use them in both savoury or sweet dishes, in a huge number of ways. When the cherries are good, there can’t be many things better than just popping them into your mouth straight from the bag/bowl though.

Lamb

The spring lambs have sprung, and now that they are all busy frolicking around the fields, it’s the tastiest moment for one to end up on your plate.

Lamb is…. just so good. It’s not going to knock pork, or venison off the top of my meat desires list, but when it is in in season, young and tender, then it is right up there with them.

Roast it and serve it with mint sauce (mint is also in season in May), with crispy roasted potatoes and some seasonal vegetables (carrots and brocoli maybe), and it’s sublime. You could also leave it to cool and cut it into slices or strips to add to a salad.

Watercress

It’s green, peppery, tangy, quintessentially English, and apparently a ’superfood’. Not everyone eats watercress, and a lot of people don’t have a clue what to do with it. There are plenty of options though, you could simply use it in a salad as you would use something like rocket, or there is the summer classic ‘Watercress soup’.

New potatoes

New potatoes are here and they are fantastic. They are best boiled or steamed, then served with olive oil or butter, added to a salad, or added to a spring vegetable soup.

Herbs

Mint, parsley, and chives are all at their best at this time of year.

I use a lot of mint, because the smell is just so good. It’s one of those things, like cinammon or fresh coffee, that smell even better than they taste. Make a mint sauce and serve it with lamb, make mint ice cream, make Moroccan mint tea, or crush it up in a mojito.

Yes, that is blue mould, but it's tasty.

I’m not too proud to admit it, my first experience with Garrotxa left me a bit confused.

The reason for my confusion was that I went out looking for what I thought (had been told) was a Catalonian aged hard cheese made from Goats milk, and that’s not what I ended up with. What I actually came back with was indeed a Catalonian goats cheese, but it isn’t really very old, and it’s semi-hard.

I am however more than happy to overlook the fact that what I got wasn’t what I thought I was getting, because I think I could very easily fall in love with this cheese.

All about Garrotxa

Garrotxa is also known as ‘formatge pell florida’, which means ‘flowery skin cheese’, this name comes from the unusual blooms of mould that cover the surface (but we’ll get to that in a minute).

It is a pressed cheese made from unpasteurised goats milk, and produced in the region of Girona in the north of Catalonia. Girona is unpolluted, rainy and mountainous. You might not want to live in the grim weather, but it does mean that the grass is lush, and the goats produce great milk, this is the basis of Garrotxa.

A lot of people think that Garrotxa is a new cheese, but they couldn’t be more wrong. It is actually a very old traditional cheese in the region, it’s just that the recipe was forgotten for while.

Following the Spanish civil war and the second world war, Spain was left in poverty. In a bizarre and misguided attempt to combat this poverty, the Spanish government implemented a policy which meant that small scale farming and production were essentially made illegal. Limits were set in place which meant that farmers had to produce large amounts of milk per day, or stop production altogether. This forced artisinal cheese making underground, and whilst the majority of cheeses survived, some (like Garrotxa) disappeared completely.

Only in the 90′s did the cheese reappear, made according to the traditional recipe, but with a slight twist given by modern production methods, like changes to the way that the curds are washed.

As it starts to age Garrotxa quickly develops an unusual blue-grey and almost suede like fungus on the outside. This is where the alternative name comes from.

The taste

Don’t be put off by the blue grey mould, this outside is completely edible, and doesn’t take a lot of chewing. It is much more like the outside of Brie, than the rind of Parmigiano or something similar.

The cheese inside is snowy white in colour, and has a moist but flakey texture that melts easily in the mouth.

It’s a bit fruity, a little bit herbal and there is also a bit of hazelnut in there. A lot of people seem to get hazelnut as the predominant flavour in this cheese, but I must have odd taste buds, because whilst it is definitely there I get it as more of an undertone.

What I love and what really sets it apart for me is the lemonyness in its taste. Lots of cheeses are citrusy, but not many are actually lemony like Garrotxa is.

Garrotxa is firm but creamy and slightly tangy, and in short fantastic.

Grate it, scrape it, love it!

Everyone knows about Parmigiano Reggiano (Parmesan). It’s hard, it’s dry, it’s strong, smelly, slightly nutty and hits your tongue with a bit of a nutty tang.

Some people (like me) will just sit and eat a block of it, but it is generally used grated or shaved in or over other dishes.

Although Parmigiano is the most well known aged hard cheese out there, it is far from the only one. There are a huge range of other fantastic cheeses that are perfect to use wherever you might normally use Parmigiano Reggiano.

What makes a good hard cheese

Pretty much any cheese that is aged long enough becomes firm. During the aging process, the moisture in the cheese evaporates and the salt in the cheese crystallizes, this is what gives Parmesan and other aged cheeses their distinct crunchiness under the teeth.

You can’t just buy a chunk of cheese, throw it on the shelf and hope for the best. Like wine, cheese needs to be aged under careful conditions, the temperature and humidity level should be kept as constant as possible, and the cheese needs to be rotated regularly. Most hard cheese are aged from anywhere between six months to seven years, but under the right conditions it is possible to age cheese for much longer.

Apart from the techniques involved in making it, and the way in which it is aged, the quality of the milk and other ingredients that go into the cheese have a big impact on the way that it tastes. A lot of the difference in the taste of cheese from different places comes from the air and the grass in that region, you can taste the difference in the milk.

Parmigiano Reggiano

Parmigiano Reggiano is a cheese made from uncooked cow’s milk, and manufactured in a small region of northern Italy.

When the cheese reaches 12 months old, each one is inspected by a master grader. If the cheese passes the inspection then it is heat branded with the logo of the Consorzio Parmigiano Reggiano. This is your sign that you are getting the best quality cheese.

Although the cheese is ready to eat after 12 months, it is normally aged for longer. 18-24 months is typical, but it can be for much longer. The longer the cheese is aged, the more intense the flavour and aroma becomes, and the drier and more crystalline in texture.

What’s in a name

Parmigiano Reggiano is often called Parmesan in English, but depending on where in the world you are, you may or may not be getting the real thing. In Europe the name Parmesan is protected by law, and only Parmigiano made in the correct region can carry the name. In other parts of the world, the term Parmesan is often applied to other chesses made in the same style.

Grana Padano

Probably the second most famous hard cheese in the world, and really very similar to its cousin Parmigiano Reggiano.

First created by Cistercian monks in the 12th century as a way to preserve excess milk, today Grana Padano is a legally protected cheese made in a specified region of Italy.

Although it is made in a similar way, using uncooked cows milk, Grana Padano is slightly milder and not as tangy as Parmigiano, and it is also a bit less crumbly in texture.

Piave

Piave comes from the Piave river valley in northern Italy. It is made from pasteurised cows milk that is partially skimmed.

What sets Piave apart from the other Italian cheeses on this list is the fact that it can be eaten either young or aged. When it is young it has quite a sweet taste, some of this sweetness is retained as the cheese ages but it also develops a slight nuttiness.

Outside of Italy, it is easier to find Piave as either vecchio or stravecchio, meaning old or extra old. Once it reaches this stage it is similar in taste to a young parmigiano, but slightly sweeter.

Aged Cheddar

So, just in case anyone starts to think that Italians have the monopoly on great hard cheeses, up pops the international crowd, starting off with one from England.

Quite possibly my favourite bit of cheese that I’ve ever stuck in my mouth was a piece of 5 year old cheddar at a farmers market in the south of England. It shares the texture characteristics of Parmigiano, and can be even more crystally, but it tastes, well… cheddary.

Cheddar ages very well. I’ve seen it on sale up to 12 years old, I’ve heard of it for sale up to 30 years old. One of the more unusual things about aged cheddar is that not only does it grate and shave very well, but it also retains the ability to melt nicely, which most harder cheeses don’t have.

Aged Gouda

As the British do with cheddar, so the Dutch do with gouda.

Now, I have to admit that I am not a fan of either gouda or edam normally, I find them both boring and bland and I don’t like the odd rubbery texture.

Aged gouda on the other hand is a completely different thing. It actually develops a strength of flavour that makes me think of is as a real cheese, something that bites you back a little bit while you are eating it. The texture also changes from that rubberiness into the classic hard cheese texture, firm and crumbly and a pleasure to bite into.

Gouda ages really nicely, and it’s not too difficult to find one that is 5 or 7 years old, at this point they really have nothing in common with a young gouda in terms of taste at all.

Even if you didn’t think that you liked gouda, then give the aged version a try, it might just change your mind.

Mahon sec

Mahon is one of the most popular Spanish cheeses, and ‘sec’ simply means dry in Spanish.

When Mahon it is young it is mild and creamy, but after it has been aged for up to a year the flavour transforms completely. The cheese becomes intense, salty, and a bit nutty, and it develops a fantastic piquant edge.

Sbrinz

Sbrinz is a Swiss cheese, again made from cows milk. It is very much like Parmigiano, but tastes just a little more cultured or refined. Sbrinz lovers (or Swiss patriots) would tell you that this is because of the clean mountain air, and great pastures that the local cows get to graze on – they might just be right.

A cheese has to be aged for a minimum of 16 months before it can legally be sold as Sprinz. As with other aged cheeses, it is normally kept for longer than this to allow the flavour to develop, and is normally sold after 24-30 months.

Sbrinz might be a bit trickier to track down that some of the others on the list, but if you can find it then it is well worth trying out.

How to store your hard cheeses

If you are lucky enough to have a wine cellar, or any kind of cellar really, then it is the ideal place to store your cheese. Cellars (generally) experience less changes of temperature and humidity than the rest of your house, and cheese likes this. It also likes to be in the dark.

Wrap the cheese in waxed paper, and if you are planning on keeping it for a reasonable length of time, then change the wrapping regularly (weekly is probably enough). If you find that mould is growing on the cheese, then just scrape the mould off, and change the wrapping.

It has no smell, a unique flavour, and you can use it to enhance the flavour of every other ingredient in a dish.

Oh, and then there is the little fact that we need it to live.

But salt is salt, right?

Umm… actually not quite.

The type of salt that you use when cooking can actually have a much bigger influence on the finished taste of the dish than you might imagine.

The types of salt

There are two basic types of salt, sea or rock. In addition to these, there are a few other variations worth mentioning, but they all come from one of the two base types.

Sea Salt
It’s really pretty logical, the oceans and seas that cover about 65% of the planet that we live on are salty water. When that water evaporates, either naturally or artificially, the salt is left behind.

Sea salt has a lovely flaky consistency, and is generally regarded as having the best flavour of all types of salt.

In my kitchen I always use Maldon sea salt, from the east coast of England, and I think that the taste is incomparable.

Rock Salt
Rock salt was formed by the gradual drying up of inland lakes and seas. Over a period of thousands of years this salt has been compacted and formed into into underground deposits.

Today we mine the rock salt, and we end up with a product that has a less pronounced flavour than sea salt, and a heavier crystalline structure.

Put rock salt in a salt mill and grind it freshly as you need it.

Table Salt
Table salt is mined like rock salt, but it is then ground up to produce a fine grained powder. Chemical and clogging agents are normally added, because without them the slightest damp will cause the salt to cake together.

Table salt is the cheapest kind of salt you can buy, but it is really a false economy, the taste is nowhere near as strong as sea or rock salt, so you end up using more of it, and I think it has a slightly chemical aftertaste.

Black Salt
Black salt is actually a dark pinkish grey, rather than black.
It is mined in India, and is the same sodium chloride as white salt, but with the addition of a high level of iron and some sulfurous compounds.

Black salt has an unusual sulfuric flavour and is mainly used in Indian cuisine.

Celery Salt
Celery salt is just fine table salt mixed together with finely ground celery seeds. I’ve never used it in cooking, but it is handy to have some around for adding to a Bloody Mary.

Flavoured Salts
There are also a huge and ever increasing range of flavoured or spiced salts on the market.

There is really no reason why you can’t whip these up yourself at home as and when you need them though, by grinding salt together with the required flavouring in a pestle and mortar. That way you avoid ending up with lots of half jars of things that you will never use again sitting in the back of your cupboard and slowly losing their flavour.

Actually ghee, or any clarified butter, does have a couple of big advantages over normal (unclarified) butter. You can keep it for much longer periods of time without being in the fridge (as long as you have it in an airtight container), and you can heat it up to a much higher temperature before it starts to burn.

Ghee is widely used in Indian cooking where it imparts a deep rich slightly nutty flavour. You could substitute butter in virtually any Indian dish, but you will find that the finished dish really loses a lot of its depth. Although Indian cuisine is the most widely known use of ghee, some other pretty diverse food cultures use it as well, including Egyptian, Ethiopian and Brazilian. If you have ever eaten Moroccan ‘smen’ you might be suprised to know that it is actually aged spiced ghee.

It’s not hard to get hold of ghee, you can buy it in most bigger supermarkets and of course any Indian grocer will stock it. If you can’t find it in the shops, or you are just one of those people who likes to do absolutely everything yourself, it’s incredibly simple to make your own.

1. Take some unsalted butter (however much you want), and put in a saucepan over a medium heat.

2. DO NOT STIR THE BUTTER, let it come to the boil and keep it a gentle simmer.

3. As the butter boils it will start to separate, let it continue cooking until the bubbling starts to lessen, the sediment at the bottom starts to brown, and the liquid underneath the froth on top starts to turn an amber colour. At the same time you will notice that your kitchen starts to smell like freshly baked croissants.

4. Take the pan of the heat immediately you notice the liquid turning amber, otherwise the ghee will burn. Skim the foam off of the top and leave it to stand and cool for about half an hour.

5. Strain the liquid through muslin or cheesecloth into sterilised jars, and throw away the sediment that you are left with.

That’s it, as the ghee cools it will turn hard and a bright yellow in colour. You can keep it in sealed jars for up to a year without it needing to be in the fridge.

It’s worth bearing in mind that your ghee is only going to be as good as your butter was, so if you are going to go through all of the effort of making it, then you may as well start out with a good quality block of butter.

Eating locally produced fresh properly grown (not in a hydroponic greenhouse in Holland) and in season produce is a joy. It’s not just the intensity of flavours in the way that things taste, but just as much the way that they smell, if you can’t smell a tomato through a plastic packet and if a surge of aroma doesn’t come up and smack you in the nose when you cut into it, then something is wrong.

So, with the all of that preamble out of the way, we can get down to a list of some of the lovely things that are in season right now. It’s not an exhaustive list, it’s just things that come to mind, and I’m sure I’ll come back and add more to it throughout the month.

Strawberries, Blackberries, Raspberries
The best known summer berries, as long as they are ripe there is no way that they can taste bad, and they smell like essence of summer days. If you can’t think of anything exciting to do with them, then don’t – just wash them and enjoy, either on their own, or with cream or thick greek yoghurt.

Loganberries
For anyone who is wondering what a loganberry is, or what the hell to do with them if you have some: It’s a hybrid cross between a raspberry and a blackberry. So, basically you can use it wherever you would normally use either of those types of berry.

Gooseberries
When I was a kid I remember eating a lot of gooseberries,I remember picking them as well, from horrible prickly bushes that want to hurt you. For some reason, gooseberries seem to have become pretty invisible lately. You don’t see many of them on supermarket shelves, but when you do spot some, grab them and make jam, or you can convert any lemon based desert recipe to use gooseberries!

Cherries
In my opinion, cherries are competing in a very close two horse race with raspberries for the crown of best summer fruit in the world. Eat them as they are, bake them in a pie, make jam, dip them in a chocolate fondue, or google for any of about a million recipes.

Aubergine
There is something strangely erotic about a nice glossy aubergine, you (well, I) just want to stroke it and caress it. Apart from all of that though, it’s a great vegetable that has a huge amount of uses, don’t be tempted just to stick it in ratatouille all of the time!
When you are picking an aubergine, always go for heaviest one, and look for a glossy and unblemished skin.

Tomatoes
Tomatoes are just tomatoes, except when they are in season and of a nice variety, when they become so much more. There are so many varieties that I wouldn’t even know where to begin with a recommendation, but those that come still on the vine are usually much more full of flavour than those that don’t. Don’t take them off of the vine stems until the moment you want to use them, or if you are roasting them then leave them on the vine and take them off after cooking.

Watercress
It’s green, peppery, tangy, quintessentially English, and apparently a ‘superfood’. Not everyone eats watercress, and a lot of people don’t have a clue what to do with it. There are plenty of options though, you could simply use it in a salad as you would use something like rocket, or there is the summer classic ‘Watercress soup’.

It is apparently still summer, although looking out of my window, you’d never believe it, but the berries are definitely still yummy.

On the way home tonight, I picked up some Glen Ample raspberries. They are smaller and sweeter than the Tulameens we ate yesterday, strangely they have little if any smell, but they are packed full of flavour and I adore them.
I’m not going to do anything with them at all, apart from just sit here and pop them one after another into my mouth, or maybe drop a few into a glass of sparkling wine.

I also picked up some “English Rose” strawberries, an organic premium variety. They are big and meaty for strawberries, very nice but with an unusual citrus flavour.
I had a couple just to try them out, and am coating the rest in a dark bitter chocolate, then melting some white chocolate with vanilla and wrapping pretty strands of that over the dark chocolate. They look ubersexy, but the taste test will have to wait till the morning.

With strawberries, the real key isn’t the variety (premium or not), or whether they are organic or not, it’s all about ripeness. Strawberries are like brie, they are always going to taste best at the moment of extreme ripeness, and just before they start to go bad. Pick the ripest and bugger the rest, in this case I’d say organic is much more of a moral decision than a taste one.

And, there are some things that can’t.

It’s the middle of the berry season here in England, and I’m loving it. I can go to a supermarket anytime of the year, and pick up something called ‘strawberries’ or ‘raspberries’, but then I put one in my mouth and find that it actually tastes of absolutely nothing!

Why bother? I’d much rather wait for the season and eat the real thing.

This afternoon, we had Tulameen Raspberries and Elsanta strawberries. They are so simply good that you don’t really have to do anything with them at all, a quick wash and just pop one of the juicy little flavourbombs into your mouth.

I served them in individual bowls, sitting on a pool of thick greek yoghurt and with a simple sugar caramel drawn in lines over the top. Where the caramel hits the yoghurt it sinks in and goes all nice and goeey, and where it hits the berries it creates crispy shards across them.

Not only does it taste fantastic, but if you serve it in a dark colour bowl then the contrast between the bowl, the white yoghurt and bright red fruit, and the pretty lines of translucent caramel mean that it is visually stunning as well.

The vast majority of cows milk that we buy and consume in the developed world has gone through two pretty major scientific processes.

Pasteurization is done for obvious reasons. Unpasteurized milk does taste a lot better (and has an odd yellowy colour), but unless you live right next to a farm, know a bit about the cows that are producing it, and aren’t going to keep it for long, then it’s probably not the best idea to buy and use it.

Homogenization on the other hand has no health or storage benefits to the milk. It’s only purposes are aesthetic and the fact that you don’t need to shake the bottle to mix the cream. It’s a complex process but the simplest explanation is that the fat particles in the milk are broken down into a smaller size so that the milk looks smooth and has no lumps of cream in it.

So, what do I get by buying unhomogenized milk, I get the kind of milk that I remember as a kid. Unhomogenized milk has that cream line at the top, so that everyone (who likes milk) wants to the one who gets to open the next bottle or carton and get the lovely fatty creamy bit.

It’s only fairly recently that homogenized milk has become the norm in the UK. When the majority of our milk came from the milkman then it was all unhomogenized, when we gave up that great institution and started buying it in the supermarket, then we didn’t use change the delivery method but also made a switch to homogenization.

Apart from the creaminess and the nostalgia of it, there are a number of other reasons why I prefer unhomogenized milk.

A lot of people and a few studies believe that there are health benefits associated with unhomogenized milk. Homogenized milk is supposedly easier to digest and there is some evidence that it is more likely to trigger allergies, and that homogenization can contribute to atherosclerosis. None of this evidence is overly strong, but why pass any foodstuff through a process that adds no positive health benefits, and may or may not add negative ones.

In the kitchen, because it has bigger fat molecules, unhomogenized cream takes about half of the time to whip that homogenized cream does, which is handy.

Apart from anything else though, and most important of all, is the fact that unhomogenized milk and cream simply tastes better!