+++SCOFF! - The free email newsletter on good food and drink. - ISSUE TWELVE, MARCH 2006. For a printable colour version of this newsletter (in a ‘pdf’ file), see: http://www.gastronomail.com/archive.htm . Please forward to all your friends and colleagues so they can register to receive their own copy by visiting our web site: http://www.gastronomail.com . We never pass on email addresses. Further information at the end of this issue. ++Issue Twelve Contents: 01: An A-Z of Scoff: the alphabet of food wisdom - ‘L’ is for ‘Low fat foods’: A question of relativity. 02: Reader offer - Saucy: 10 per cent discount on Jethro’s Marinades. 03: Review: Striking a blow for our national treasure - The Big Book of Beer, by Adrian Tierney-Jones - Reviewed by Rupert Ponsonby. 04: Recipe: Roast potato fans - by Johnny 6. 05: The drink spot: Rising alcohol levels in wine - Enough already, by Joanna Simon. 06: Titbits and crumbs: Food quotes - a bon mot for every situation; ‘Lovethatstuff’ - Fairtrade links; Could you survive as a hunter- gatherer? - ‘Mesolithic food quiz’. 07: The food spot: Luxury, exoticism and broad beans. In July 2005 we told the story of how Piers Bearne and his brother-in- law won the ITV show ‘Too Many Cooks’. The prize was a trip to a cookery school in Morrocco: here’s how he got on. 08: How to: Make scrumptious stock - Tips on making and storing all kinds of stock, by Dan Jellinek. [Contents ends]. +01: An A-Z of Scoff: the alphabet of food wisdom - ‘L’ is for ‘Low fat foods’. If a food is labelled as ‘low fat’ the government recommends that it should contain less than 3g of fat per 100g or 1.5g of fat per 100ml. Fat-free products should contain no more than 0.5g of fat per 100g or 100ml, ‘low saturated fat’ products no more than 1.5g of saturated fat and trans-fatty acids per 100g or 0.75g per 100ml; and ‘free of saturated fat’ products no more than 0.1g of saturated fat and trans- fatty acids per 100g or 100ml. The bad news is that none of these specifications are legal requirements, so it is worthwhile checking the full nutritional information on a product if you are not sure. The good news is that where a nutritional claim like ‘low fat’ is made, nutrition labelling is mandatory. (Where no claim is made, no information has to be given, though many manufacturers give information anyway.) Nutritional information must include the amount of energy in kilojoules (kJ) and kilocalories (kcal) that a food provides, and the amount of fat. Information must always be given as values per 100g or 100ml, and if the number of portions in a product is given on the label the value per specified portion size can also be given. Watch out for this, and make sure you know which one you are reading! Claims such as ‘reduced fat,’ ‘reduced calorie’ or ‘light’ are merely relative terms, meaning they contain less fat or calories than a higher fat counterpart. ‘Reduced fat’ can only be used if the product has at least 25% fat than a standard product, but remember all these terms could still mean the product has a lot of fat or calories in it – just less than the full fat version. Remember too that there are different ways to reduce fat in a diet. After all, instead of always using low fat or ‘lite’ products which may sometimes have less taste, you could always eat the real thing but less of it! +02: Reader Offer: Saucy marinades. Jethro’s Marinades started life as a family business in 1991 on a dairy farm in the south east of England, founded by Adrienne Palmer, the daughter of a former member of the rock band Jethro Tull. Jethro's make ready-to-use, tenderising marinades in eight innovative flavours, using original recipes and good 100% natural ingredients such as wines, fruit juices, spices, herbs and olive oils. Examples are their spicy Orange & Cumin marinade with chilli, and their Amadou barbecue sauce with hot pepper and molasses. They also create eight sauces and vinaigrette dressings – and for those of you watching your waistlines the Ginger & Lime range of sauces are a firm favourite as they’re completely fat free. Find out more at: http://www.jethros.co.uk You can order their products in packs of six or gift boxes of four. And in a special offer for Scoff! readers, if you send back their mail order form mentioning Scoff! you will receive a 10% discount on all orders. +03: Striking a blow for our national treasure - The Big Book of Beer, by Adrian Tierney-Jones - Reviewed by Rupert Ponsonby. Adrian Tierney-Jones has struck a significant blow for beer with his new book. It’s brimming with fresh moody photography, allowing his reader to understand what beer is, and was, all about. So many books these days are full of words, writers being frustrated people who can’t use cameras. But this book is different. It has real balance and it will appeal to anyone, even if they're not that interested in beer. Why? Well, Britain’s national drink is still regarded by 98% of Brits as a working class, male, pedestrian, mono-flavoural brew. 9/10 think it all tastes the same and that beer is just lager, stout or ale. But as there are over 200 styles of beer, they are sorely mistaken, and T-J dispels the myths in a way that anyone can appreciate and understand. 'Beer is a man's drink?’ Not so, apparently, for historically it was female territory and its ownership was only stripped away from women over the last 100 years by those vile creatures, men. In ancient Iraq or Egypt, or in the Britain of mediaeval times, it was women who brewed the beer and this continued into the country house tradition in the 1600s and later. The Big Book of Beer covers a spread of well researched topics including the rising campaign for matching beer with foods in pubs and top restaurants; beer recipes; pub games; breweries; beer styles and the pub itself. It is one of those wonderfully friendly books, which you will want to dip into time and time again. NOTE: Rupert Ponsonby is a founder of the Beer Academy. The Big Book of Beer is published by the Campaign for Real Ale, priced £14.99: http://www.camra.org.uk/books +04: Recipe: Roast potato fans - by Johnny 6. Make an everyday dish really special with this neat trick to turn roast potatoes into a beautiful, crispy fan-shaped display on the plate. The trick to get the fans to open up fully is to make the base cut concave to hollow the base out slightly. - 2-3 small to medium potatoes per person, preferably Maris Piper or Wilja (if medium you could cut in half). - Duck fat or olive oil. Peel potatoes, then soak for a while in cold water, preferably overnight. Cut a slice off each potato, to create a flat bottom, then scoop a shallow concave depression out of it with an ice-cream scoop or spoon. Place each potato on its flat bottom and make a series of vertical cuts into the other side of the potato about two thirds of the way down towards the bottom, with about a quarter of an inch between each cut. The uncut base should also be left about a quarter inch thick. Place the potatoes base side down in a pan of cold water and bring to the boil, then simmer for about five minutes. Lift them out using a flat lifter and place flat side down in a baking dish with a little duck fat or good quality olive oil (duck fat is best though). Separate each of the vertical slices using either matchsticks (heads removed!) or thickish cocktail sticks. Mix a little duck fat with a generous pinch of salt and using a pastry brush work the mixture well into the gaps. Put into a preheated oven at about 190 centigrade for 15-20 minutes, then turn down to 180 degrees until they are golden and crispy — about a further 50 minutes. +05: The Drink Spot: Enough already by Joanna Simon. Last night I drank two glasses of red wine, then slid under the table. Okay, so that’s not quite true. I drank two generous glasses, then wished I hadn’t, especially this morning, because the wine in question – a Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz blend from the Barossa Valley – turned out to have 15.5% alcohol. That’s more alcohol than many a modern fino sherry. More to the point, it’s significantly higher than ordinary table wine used to be (ordinary is not a comment on quality; I simply mean not strengthened like port, sherry, Muscat de Beaumes de Venise and so on, or made from raisined grapes which naturally produce higher alcohol). Admittedly, 15.5% is towards the top end of today’s figures, but 14.5%, which until the end of the 1990s looked like something from the extreme school of winemaking, is now commonplace. And it’s not just reds: there are Viogniers, Chardonnays, Grüner Veltliners, even Sauvignon Blancs and Rieslings with 14 or more per cent alcohol. And they aren’t exceptional: 14.2% was the average alcohol of Australian wine in 2002, up from 12.4% in 1984. I could go on. In fact, I’m going to. Red Bordeaux (claret to your parents’ generation) is now often 13% alcohol; some is 14%. Yet some of the historic greats were only 11%, and 12% was the standard until recently. Ornellaia, the highly-rated Cabernet-based red from Bolgheri in Tuscany was 12.5% in its first vintage, 1985, and 14.5% by 1998. Some older vintages of Grange, Australia’s most celebrated wine, have been 11.5%; 14% is the norm today. By now you should either be saying “so what?” Or “why should this be?” Or both. Well, I think you should know why, even if you’re a “so what?” The reason alcohol levels have soared is because grapes are being picked deliberately riper, so that they taste fruitier, fuller and softer, in line with popular contemporary taste. In the past, young reds, especially those with pretensions to quality, often had bitter, gum- clinging tannins. They softened with age, but now you don’t have to wait. (If you feel nostalgic for old-style tannin, try a cup of cold, strong builders’-brew tea or the skin of an unripe pear. That should cure you.) With ripeness comes sugar, which means more sugar to convert into alcohol. Pruning and other techniques used by growers to produce lower yields per vine improve flavours, but also enhance sugar levels. Add to that the fact that the cultured yeasts that now dominate wine production are more efficient at converting sugar into alcohol than naturally occurring yeasts and you can see that this is looking like a one-way street. Well it is a bit one-way at present, but the Australians are trying to develop yeasts that don’t produce so much alcohol. They know ever higher alcohol levels don’t look good to the health police, and they’re aware that the current fashion for big ripe flavours could go the way of all fashion. Some UK retailers say people are already starting to look for slightly lower alcohol wines – 13% rather than 14.5%. Believe it or not, I’ve got nothing against huge, high-alcohol wines – I liked that Barossa Cabernet Shiraz until this morning – but I don’t want wines like that very often, and more than anything I want to be able to have the choice. NOTE: Joanna Simon is wine writer of The Sunday Times and one of their team of cookery writers. Her books include Discovering Wine, Wine: an Introduction and Wine with Food. +06: Titbits and Crumbs. - Food quotes. Find a bon mot for every situation with this compendium of more than 2,000 food-related quotes, organised by subject, from the US site Foodreference.com: www.foodreference.com/html/quotes.html - ‘Lovethatstuff’. Information and links relating to Fairtrade food and other products, including local Fairtrade town and city web sites: www.lovethatstuff.co.uk/info.html - Could you survive as a hunter-gatherer? ‘Mesolithic food quiz’ from the Museum of Antiquities at the University of Newcastle which enables you to find out how long you would have lasted in the stone age: http://museums.ncl.ac.uk/flint/foodquiz.html NOTE: Scoff! is giving away books on food and wine to readers who send in their favourite link, if published. Email to: dan@gastronomail.com. +07: The food spot: Luxury, exoticism and broad beans - by Piers Bearne. The story so far: neophyte chef and his far more competent brother-in- law audition for low-rent ITV show ‘Too Many Cooks’. They defeat all comers to lift the prize of a week at a cooking school in Marrakech. This despite celebrity chef Gino D’Acampo spitting out their unshelled broad beans in round one with a one-word verdict — “shit” (for the full story see Scoff! issue seven, July 2005). It took eight months for Granada to organise our holiday. I didn’t actually bother to book the time off, so convinced was I that the TV company would renege on the prize. After all, the producers had all lost money in their sweepstake by betting against us at each stage of the show. So imagine my surprise when we were chauffeured to a first class private villa on the outskirts of Marrakech. My room and balcony were larger than my flat in London, and the view of the desert was fabulous. The others on the course turned out to be a motley crew of retired Americans and Canadians who had all forked out over two grand for the week. Yes, we were worried. No, we shouldn’t have been — they were excellent company. Cooking classes started the next morning. It turned out that we were going to be learning traditional Moroccan dishes — we were sick of the word “tagine” by the end of the week — mostly by watching. One of us would chop coriander or onions with a blunt knife, to the hilarity of the staff. And drink the very pleasant local wine. Every morning and every evening. Without fail. Bouchra, the head chef, was a big warm-hearted kitchen animal from Algeria. She dictated recipes in Arabic, which were then translated for us. (I suspect she spoke rather more English than she let on.) Moroccan food is pretty varied, even if the Americans did complain about the number of tagines. You can’t really go wrong with lemon, coriander, parsley, red onions and huge lashings of oil, garlic and chilli powder. I picked up a fabulous recipe for baked monkfish tails in a kind of warm gazpacho, topped with grilled peppers; and came across orange flower water for the first time. Perhaps the best experience of all was when the staff were given the night off and a few of us decided to stay in and cook. Ben whipped up an incredibly tasty pasta and chicken combo, we drank red wine, and we actually got to use the kitchen rather than watch other people do it. In a delicious irony, the last day’s recipe was broad bean tagine. With the shells on. It turns out we were right, and Gino was wrong. Shame it took a luxury holiday in Marrakech to get our vindication, but we all have to suffer for our art. 08: How to: Make scrumptious stock - by Dan Jellinek. Fish, meat and vegetable stocks are one of the secrets of good cooking, and they are so cheap and easy to make. They keep for a few days in the fridge (non-poultry meat stocks are more robust and last for a week or so) or can be frozen until needed. Always label – even if you think you will use it soon and remember what it is, why not hedge your bets? And here’s an extra tip: freeze some of it in an ice-cube tray. Then you can use little bits in sauces or gravies as required. 1: Always be on the lookout for little trimmings to make your stocks with. Those leek tops you are about to chuck out – wash them and save them for the stock-pot. Same with all green vegetable leaves and trimmings, or vegetables that are just about to go off. Freeze them and bung them straight in from the freezer when you do need them. 2: When you are making stock, put larger items like bones and onion halves in first, then bring to the boil and skim. Only after you have skimmed off the fatty froth should you add smaller bits and pieces like peppercorns and garlic, otherwise they will just be skimmed off at the beginning! 3: Fish stock is quick to make but if you are asking for bones from your fishmonger, make sure there are no oily fish in there, only white fish carcasses. Discard anything that looks dark or oily, and fish-heads can be a bit oily too. 4: When you are putting a large stock pot on to boil, resist the temptation to put the cold water on a high heat and then try to remember to come back and turn it down when it boils. You will forget. Put it on a low to medium heat. 5: When meat stock is ready, pour everything through one of those rigid conical colanders into a bowl – ideally a stainless steel bowl with liquid measurements on the side – and press everything down hard with a wooden spoon to extract all the goodness. Then cool, refrigerate overnight and skim off the fat before reheating to use. Always make sure you bring meat stock to the boil again if you have kept it for a while. ++End Notes: +HOW TO RECEIVE YOUR REGULAR ‘SCOFF!’ To subscribe to this free monthly bulletin, Send a blank email to scoff-subscribe@gastronomail.com Please encourage your friends and colleagues to subscribe! To unsubscribe at any time, email: scoff-unsubscribe@gastronomail.com For further information on subscription see: http://www.gastronomail.com . +ACCESSIBILITY NOTE: This newsletter conforms to the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) Standard, which makes email publications easier to access for people with impaired vision using text-to-speech devices. For details see: http://www.headstar.com/ten . +COPYRIGHT 2006 Gastronomail Ltd. If you would like to reproduce stories from this newsletter, we generally allow this as long as a full credit is included, with our web address and a description of our newsletter. For permission please email jo@gastronomail.com . +PERSONNEL: Food Editor - Dan Jellinek dan@gastronomail.com Drinks editor – Johnny Ray johnny@gastronomail.com Consultant Editor – Hattie Ellis hattie@gastronomail.com Marketing Director – Jo Weatherall jo@gastronomail.com [Issue ends.]