You mousse try M Blanc’s way with egg whites!

YOU know me by now, I don’t like waste and I believe one dish or ingredient can lead to another. Which is how I found the perfect way to use leftover egg whites.

I am really into creme brulee at the moment but it does leave you with an awful lot of egg whites. They do make a half-decent omelette but I wouldn’t go mad over it. So I Googled and came up with Raymond Blanc’s chocolate mousse.

It is ultra-light and all you need are the egg whites, quality chocolate, caster sugar and the tiniest drop of lemon juice. And an electric whisk helps.

 

Get the best chocolate you can

Fold the chocolate into the whites

To make four to fill glasses or ramekins you need:

7 egg whites

6oz chocolate, at least 60pc (the stronger the better )

1.5oz caster sugar

Quarter tsp lemon juice

This last time I had three egg whites so just halved the recipe. It was Fair Trade from Oxfam, only £1.75 as they had an offer on.

Break up and melt the chocolate in a glass bowl over simmering water, ensuring the bottom does not touch the water. When melted I added a little brandy, which Blanc does not do.

Meanwhile I whisked the whites with the lemon to soft peaks then added the sugar and whisked again to stiff peaks.

Blanc advises us to quickly whisk one-third of the egg white mixture into the chocolate then fold the rest in. Spoon into glasses or ramekins and refrigerate until firm. Dusting with cocoa powder (adds a professional touch.

It’s an easy-peasy recipe which works very well. I am sure Monsieur Blanc will go far.

A Sunday lunch, in which I am overfaced by Mr Brown

Cary Brown explains a concept at Barlow Woodseats Hall

YOU know that old cliché about tables groaning with food? Well ours was. There were slices of very decent beef the size of rosy red doorsteps, wedges of tender pork so big they could almost have been a pig, wings and breasts of chicken, ribs of lamb, sausages wrapped in bacon and stuffing like golf balls.

 And then they brought the Yorkshire Puddings, the size and shape of cumulus clouds, with crispy crunchy roast potatoes posing as cannon balls. A big dish of cauliflower cheese followed, with another of vegetables. And a half pint jug of proper gravy. Talk about trencherman food: this could have filled a WW1 trench.

 “Right,” I said to my wife.”We’re going to tackle this the Victorian way, eating slowly.” But it beat us in the end and we were the ones groaning – with pleasure. If we had carried on we would have been like Monty Python’s Mr Creosote and exploded.

 “This is like going to an all you can eat buffet, only in this case they bring it to your table and it tastes of something,” I added.
 

Just part of the main course

We haven’t had a Sunday lunch like this since that time at the Royal Oak, Millthorpe, and it was the same chef. So if I couldn’t tackle all that food I went to tackle the man responsible, Cary Brown. “Sunday lunch should be a time for indulgence. If people say I’ve overfaced them I don’t get offended,” he said.

 Cary has had almost as many venues as I’ve had hot dinners and that’s saying something. A month or two ago he and his partner Shelley spectacularly left the Devonshire Arms at Middle Handley after a dispute with the owners, draining the place dry with free beer for friends and regulars. Since legal matters loom we’ll say no more.

 He has popped up at historic 16^th century Barlow Woodseats Hall, down a lane called Johnnygate that leads to nowhere except this former home of the famous Bess of Hardwick, the Elizabethan lass who had four husbands and ended up as the Countess of Shrewsbury. She and Robert Barlow were only 14 at the time and he died within a year.

 To be more precise Mr Brown has popped up in the Long Barn next door, a magnificent Grade II listed medieval cruck barn which, the last time I looked when reporting for the Sheffield Star was a cowshed knee deep in manure. That was in 2006 when the Milward family put the hall on the market for a million quid and right next door was a working farm, all smells and moos.

 I never checked to see if it had sold but if I had I could have reported it was bought by Nick Todd and his family, a partner in the long established Sheffield auctioneers and valuers, Ellis Willis & Beckett. He did up the hall, bought the barn and it is now a weddings and functions venue and, with Cary at the stove, a pop-up for Sunday luncheons and afternoon teas. The next will be in September and, at £25 a head, you get a doggy bag to take home.

 Nick and Cary, who met over the bar at the Royal Oak just down the road, have big plans for the barn, which comes with several cottages built from the old stables, still with some of the original features plus up to the minute wet rooms, kitchens and four poster beds.

 My wife Sue and I take a break for air after that main course (but before Shelley’s lovely passionfruit cheesecake and chocolate profiteroles) and Nick walks us around the garden with a brace or two of peacocks who have just been in the family way, orchard, pond, tropical garden and lawns. He may have a posh house but he’s not sniffy about letting guests enjoy the surroundings. He seems to enjoy sharing them.

 We join Cary later for coffee and he’s busy tossing culinary concepts up in the air like a juggler with plates. Here’s one. “It can be sweet and it can be savoury but you’ll have to wait and see,” he grinned. Here’s a clue: it’s on wheels. Oh and did I mention the Sunday lunch was absolutely first class?

 *Check Cary’s Facebook and Twitter pages for details of the next Sunday lunch in September. Details going up soon on www.barlowwoodseatshall.com

 

LATEST NEWS: Sunday lunches are on hold at the moment, as is the hall website, while planning difficulties are being resolved.

 

Jack pops up with the pies

Everything on the menu is a pie

The chicken pies had sold out first. “Chicken pie,” ordered the next man in the queue. “I’m sorry, they’ve all gone,” said pie man Jack Norman. “There’s a mystery one left: I know it’s not beef so it could be chicken or cheddar. It’s a one in two chance.”

You’ll find 24 year old Jack, an escapee from Pizza Express, every Thursday in the Pop Up Café on the corner of Union Street. I took a flyer off an A-board on The Moor, followed the directions and got a quid off my lunch when I showed it.

Jack started Pie Eyed 18 months ago and makes the pies at the Century Business Centre in Rotherham, where he’s from. They are proper pies with proper pastry, all butter shortcrust, not bought-in. His meat and vegetables are bought from local suppliers. “No additives. No nonsense. Just proper pies,” is the business’s selling point.

Union Street is a co-working, hot desking workspace with Wi Fi and meeting rooms for hire with a pop up café on the ground floor. At the risk of sounding like the Sixties pop group The Scaffold, Mondays is bagels, Tuesday’s salads, Wednesday is pasta,Thursday’s pies and Friday is waffles.

Pie, mash, peas and gravy – lovely

Jack has been at Union Street for just a year. “I worked at Pizza Express. It’s not cooking, is it, but I learned a lot. But it was not what I really wanted to do with my life,” he said, serving me up a beef brisket and Black Sheep Ale pie (£3.50) with mash, peas and gravy each at 50p a time. You can take away or sit and eat, cutlery and Henderson’s provided, at big chummy tables.

“I’d seen the interest in street food but it was barbecued food and pizzas. Nobody seemed to be doing the British classics, like pies,” he added.

At Union Street, handily sited between Sheffield Hallam University, the Peace Gardens, The Moor and the Millennium Gallery, he sells around 60 pies a day. He makes about a dozen varieties all told and there are always three on offer: the beef is a regular and today there is also chicken, chorizo and butterbean plus a veggie pie, Cheddar and caramelised red onion.

The customer decided to go for the Mystery Pie.

Thursdays at Union Street is not going to make his fortune but it keeps him busy. This lunchtime they are queuing out the door. It’s just him. “Everyone else has two people but Jack does it all himself,” said a Union Street official. The cafe acts as a showcase for Pie Eyed because he also caters for weddings and other celebrations, as well as turning up at events like the Peddler Market on Arundel Street.

My pie is pretty substantial and very tasty, while the crust is admirably short. In fact, it’s so filling I don’t want much tea. After a lifetime of eating pies I’d rate it as seriously good.

And the Mystery Pie? It was chicken.

Pie Eyed pops up every Thursday. For more details visit www.PieEyed.co.uk or www.union-st.org

 

What pops up when

 

Jamie pops up with a classic

Earl Grey tea smoked salmon

Now that’s a blast from the past! Looking at the menu of Jamie Bosworth’s ‘pop up’ restaurant at the Rendezvous cafe, Totley, one dish leaps out at us: the tea smoked salmon. It was the dish his late, talented brother Wayne introduced to Sheffield back in the Nineties.

It was new to the city and became a sort of classic although since then seems to have fallen out of favour until recently. Jamie credits his brother on the menu.

 We disagree over where we ate it. Rafters, I say, referring to the restaurant the Bosworth brothers ran together at Nether Green. Brasserie Leo at London Road’s Charnwood Hotel, she says.

 Jamie, after the meal, solves the riddle: it was at Henfrey’s, the posh little room upstairs at the Charnwood. Wayne used to smoke it on demand then and serve it hot. We had it and thought it lovely. The Yorkshire Post critic complained that the aroma made him think it was November 5.

 He might have had a point. One night Wayne was cooking with Nathan Smith, now at the Old Vicarage, as his sous and Nathan put the hot pan on the vinyl floor, welding the two together.

 Tonight the salmon is not smoked on demand – there are 24 covers to be fed from a tiny kitchen with only four rings – but is prepared in advance. The smokiness from the Earl Grey tea is subtle, the overall impression, aided by a citrus miso glaze and little blobs of pickled cucumber jelly, is a starburst of flavour.

The beef main course at Jamie’s pop up restaurant

 “With such a small kitchen I have to think very carefully about the menus,” says Jamie. But if not everything is cooked, rather than assembled, on the night there is some impressive attention to detail.

 Canapes of crab fritters come with a spicy mango ketchup which makes me yearn to get the recipe and copy it (I forget to ask). Goats cheese arrives in a creamy swirl with roasted beets, a crostini and, oddly, hazelnut praline.

 The main course is terrific: a tender slice of Angus beef which had been barbecued first so the fatty exterior was crozzled into lip-smacking sweetness, a rich wild mushroom and truffle oil gravy moistening it.

 ‘Pop ups’ have become trendy, of late, but Jamie points out he has been running them for the last five years. This is his third location, suggested by his daughter Katie who, following in the family tradition, works there as a waitress.

 Jamie has left behind his restaurant days – Rafters, Bosworth’s at Sheffield United and his acclaimed Taste gastro-café – and is now development chef for Jigsaw Foods and available for private hire. The once a month evening is highly popular and helps to scratch an itch, I’d guess. With a waiting list of around 60, Jamie ran the menu on two successive nights to eat into the backlog.

 We finish on a lovely note, an Amarula flavoured panna cotta in a Kilner jar. It’s a South African liqueur. Again, there’s plenty of work involved. There’s a very rich chocolate orange ganache, some honeycomb and a white chocolate crumb. Not so much that your palate loses a sense of direction but enough to maintain interest and surprise.

 Five courses with coffee cost £28. Well worth it.

 Rendezvous is at 185 Baslow Road, Sheffield S17 4DT. To book a table call 0114 235 0884

 

Jamie Bosworth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A passion for paella

Omar gets all steamed up over his paella

A dark back yard in the drizzling rain off a busy Sheffield street is not the most exotic location for cooking paella. But then the city has had few chefs as exotic as Omar Allibhoy, even if he’s only here on a temporary basis.

On March 16 the photogenic young Spaniard, dark-eyed, dark-haired and bearded, opens the fifth branch of his Tapas Revolution mini-chain in Meadowhall, so we can stuff ourselves silly with pulpa a la Gallega and pimientos de Padron without troubling easyJet.

You’d think Omar, from Madrid, would have it in for Sheffield. Five years ago he and his pal rode their scooters from Liverpool on the west coast to the east, cooking tapas for anyone they met on the way. They stopped at a Sheffield Travelodge overnight and had one of the bikes nicked. But at least he got to Grimsby before Sacha Baron Cohen!

To promote the new enterprise, still being built as I write, Omar had taken over Matthew Holdsworth’s tiny Bhaji Shop bistro on Chesterfield Road for the night to host a pop-up restaurant for local foodies and bloggers. There are tapas but the highlight of the night is the paella.

Omar needs a metre-wide paella pan and the Bhaji’s kitchen was much too small so he camped out under an awning in the back yard. The weather is less than Spanish. I nip out to take a look and he emerges from a cloud of steam as the dish cooks fragrantly. He might be worth a mint by now but, while he’s brought a team of chefs to help him, he’s still in charge of the paella. It’s his particular passion.

When it arrives it is an intensely, savoury, smoky, complex dish heady with the smell and taste of saffron and paprika, with chicken (but no rabbit), artichokes, three types of beans and rice which is still firm yet yielding to the tooth. It’s quite the best I have ever had.

Omar got a leg up in life working for the world’s most famous chef, Farran Adria, and the world’s sweariest, Gordon Ramsay, who dubbed him the restaurant version of Antonio Banderas. That was worth a few PR and newspaper headlines (and it’s on the cover of his recipe book) but he does display an engaging enthusiasm.

While all his outlets are in mega shopping outlets I observe it is unusual for Sheffield to get a trendy chain restaurant so soon. Usually all the big names go to Shrewsbury before Sheffield. The city can’t even sustain a Loch Fyne, which has just closed. He winces slightly at the word ‘chain,’ as if someone has just knocked over a dish of his albondigas, and stresses everything except the bread will be made on site: no microwaves, no heat-and-eat, no freezers. “It doesn’t feel like a chain to us; it’s a very personal project.” OK, whatever the Spanish is for autonomous link in a chain, it’s that!

Of course, any food which you get for free will taste wonderful but, that aside, it was very, very good indeed. We weren’t fed any old patatas bravas – in fact we didn’t get that at all – and for me the starriest dishes were the chorizo a la sidra (lovely sweet and spicy Asturian sausages roasted in cider), pulpo a la Gallega (soft steamed octopus with sliced potato in paprika) and some intensely cumin-flavoured meatballs.

And, of course, there was excellent Iberico ham, Manchego cheese, marinated anchovies and much more, washed down with Sangria, Spanish beer and wine.

Omar is on a mission to introduce the city to what he calls real tapas. He mutters that Britain  has seen ‘the dark side of Spanish food.’ But we’re not such principiantes (beginners) in the tapas department. Back in the Nineties that excellent chef Michael Morgan introduced them at his Mediterranean restaurant in Hunter’s Bar.

One more thing. At the same time as Omar opens Tapas Revolution there will be a churroseria, a kiosk selling that famous Spanish snack, next door. Can’t wait.

More details at http://www.tapasrevolution.com The book, Tapas Revolution, is published by Ebury Press at £20.

Steamed octopus and potatoes

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