BBC Food blog

Would you open your home to strangers and make them dinner? Keen cooks like ex-NME photographer Kerstin Rogers and food stylist Arno Maasdorp have proven the supper club to be a winning formula.

Blogger and supper club host James Ramsden transforms his living room every couple of weeks. With additional help from his sister, Mary, they plan, advertise and prepare a multi-course dinner for a group of around 25 hungry guests, often strangers congregated together on a table. We attended one of their events to go and see just how difficult it is to host a supper club.

As popular clubs are springing up outside of London – notably in Bristol, Leeds and Manchester – we want to know whether you have eaten dinner in a stranger’s house recently. And are you looking to host a supper club?

Michael Kibblewhite works for the BBC Food website.

When homemade pizza is at its best it can rival or even better those from fancy restaurants and pizzerias. Yes, we’d all like wood-fired ovens at home but even with a kitchen oven you can be making pizzas to be proud of.

The American baking star Peter Reinhart started a pizza blog called Pizza Quest which goes into brilliantly geeky detail about the dough types, the flours, the different methods and sauces, and answers practically all your pizza making questions. But you must also look at “Slice” on the Serious Eats website. Adam Kuban, the founder and top dog editor, and publisher Ed Levine are obsessive about their pizzas and if it doesn’t get you revved up and into pizza mania then nothing will.

Pizza geekiness aside, you can turn out excellent pizza at home so long as you have these five essentials:

1. A really hot oven or grill

You ideally want an oven that will go to at least 240C/475F. The oven needs to have good even heat and the best way to check that is by baking a loaf of bread on a tray and once it’s cool check the base - if it’s much paler than the top then your oven needs help. A heavy pizza stone or a metal griddle placed in the cold oven and heated will help stop your pizzas looking flabby.

But if you don’t have a hot enough oven but do have a grill then Heston demonstrates a brilliant way that combines the hob and the grill for a perfect pizza from his In Search of Perfection BBC series.

2. Soft white bread dough

Essentially pizza is made with a simple flour, salt and yeast dough mixed with enough water to make it very soft and stretchy. And for a very basic pizza dough, a recipe like this from Antony Worrall Thompson will be fine. But of course, if you’re after pizza perfection you’ll want to personalise the ingredients and the method. As Ed says on Slice, “we should celebrate and praise crust diversity in pizza, not bury it.”

Flour: Though an Italian 00 flour is essential if you want to replicate the traditional pizza from Naples, and that’s my preference, many prefer a strong bread flour as it can be coaxed out extra thin without too much worry. My choice for an excellent strong flour recipe would be J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s “New York Style Pizza at Home”.

Fat, sugar and malt: Fat, whether you use lard or oil, slightly interferes with the formation of gluten in the dough, and that means a more tender crust less likely to turn brittle in the dry oven. It also helps the dough to colour quickly, as does a little sugar or malt. Pizza makers in Italy often use special flours that have an elevated natural maltose level, which means that they don’t have to add any extra to the flour. But at home, a little sugar, honey or malt (even a dark beer will do) will help your dough to colour quickly and stray crisp but moist and tender.

3. Stretch it in stages

One secret to getting a thin crust pizza is to divide the dough into portions (the site pizzamaking.com has a terrific online calculators for making the right amount of dough), say 200g/7oz dough for each 25cm/10in thin crust pizza. Shape these portions into rounds, place on a dusted worktop, cover with a cloth and leave for 15 minutes. This will make the dough relax, and then it will be much easier to stretch into perfect pizza rounds.

4. Dry your topping first

When most ingredients are heated they change in some way. The sauce, cheese, vegetables and cured meats soften and release liquid or fat, turning a delicious mass into an oily pizza pond. To avoid this, dry wet cheese like mozzarella out on a cloth, cook the sauce until it is thick and spreadable but not runny, and allow for the fat released from meats etc before adding any extra oil.

5. Go light on the topping

Less topping makes a better pizza. Memorise that phrase and you’ll make better, crisper pizzas. Ideally your pizza should have a thin ring of crust and be completely cooked through. Too much sauce, cheese and other bits will cause the topping run over the crust, stop heat from penetrating, lower the tray or stone temperature, and generally ruin what might have been excellent pizza.

Have you successfully made pizza at home? What are your tips for pizza perfection?

Dan Lepard is a food writer for the Guardian and a baking expert.

Food history is in vogue. Chocolatiers have been serving up a slice of nostalgia with flavours like millionaire’s shortbread, teacake and jaffa cakes, and popping candy has been popping up on menus all around the country. Some chefs are looking even further back to Britain’s food heritage. 

At The Gilbert Scott, Marcus Wareing’s list of dishes pays tribute to early eighteenth century writers John Nott, Mrs Beeton, Florence White and Agnes B Marshall. Then there’s Heston Blumenthal’s collaboration with the Tudor food historians at Hampton Court Palace, which had a profound affect on his much-lauded London venue, Dinner – the most obvious being meat fruit (circa 1500). As we’re now seeing the trend widening outside of London, just why are historical recipes making a return?

Food historian Marc Meltonville recreates life in Henry VIII's kitchens at Hampton Court

The Minnis in Birchington, Kent, is using archaic cooking methods. Chef Jason Freedman’s menu is based around produce that has been cured, dried, smoked, pickled, preserved and brined in-house. Here you’ll find corned beef with dripping, homemade piccalilli and pickled onions. Take a closer look and you’ll even witness ancient food preservation methods brought to Britain two thousand years ago by Roman invaders. For Jason, chefs “need to look at the past to get a glimpse of the future. Studying the old techniques allows you to open your mind to the products available nowadays, and with the use of modern technology, you can create so many new variants of old historic dishes.”

Indeed cooks throughout the centuries have been using techniques and presentation skills that wouldn’t look out of place in today’s ‘molecular gastronomy’ kitchens. For instance, Agnes B Marshall was making parmesan ice cream and using liquid nitrogen for making frozen desserts as far back as the nineteenth century.

Home cooks are becoming curious too. Penguin’s recent Great Food series, which showcases food and cookery writing from the last 400 years, makes legends like M.F.K. Fisher, Alexis Soyer and Eliza Acton accessible to a younger generation.

This current interest in food and drink history is largely due to the renaissance of British cuisine in recent years. We’ve had a love affair with numerous foreign cuisines over the decades – even declaring chicken tikka masala as our national dish at one stage – and for too long we have considered French cuisine to be the root of serious gastronomy. Looking to history is a way of rediscovering, and becoming proud of, our own culinary identity.

Add to that the celebratory spirit of the recent royal wedding, as well as next year’s London Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and it’s no wonder that we’re flying the flag for kedgeree, Bakewell tart and Eccles cakes.

Would you like to see recipes like Sussex pond pudding resurrected on restaurant menus? Which nostalgic flavours, dishes or cooking techniques would you like to bring back?

Sejal Sukhadwala is a food journalist and restaurant reviewer.

As a food journalist I own a lot of books about food. What often surprises people, however, is that I don’t own too many cookery books. Recently on this blog Dan Lepard asked what we wanted from such instructional tomes, the gist being we seem to want lifestyle, not recipes.

 

Indeed, the recipe count in most cookery books seems to have been falling of late. Rick Stein’s ‘Spain’ contains 140 recipes on 320 pages, while Jamie Oliver’s forthcoming ‘Great Britain’, has 130 recipes also on 320 pages. Compare this to around 180 on 250 pages for his debut ‘The Naked Chef’ way back in 1999. Going back further sees ‘Restaurant Dishes of the World’ by Margaret Fulton (published in 1983) containing around 190 complex recipes on 140 pages, and in the likes of Mrs Beeton there are over a 1000.

But is it always about quantity? Would we ever attempt to ‘complete’ all the recipes in any given cookbook anyway? A quick straw poll of my friends on twitter asking ‘what was the last cookbook you bought and how many recipes have you cooked from it?’ revealed the following:

karen_loasby: Madhur Jaffrey, Curry Easy. Zero recipes
miss_ingredient: Ottolenghi’s ‘Plenty’. 4 recipes so far
BigSpud: Jamie 30 min meals, about 20

I reckon on average we attempt around 10 to 15% of the recipes in any given book, which rather begs the question why are we buying them?

Perhaps the problem is too many cookbooks spoiling the broth? When we want a pork recipe, we have to open each book and search its index. That’s rather time consuming when you’ve got even a moderate collection of books. So much so in fact that a service called eatyourbooks.com has sprung up which lets you search online in the indexes of books you own for $25 a year.

Many sources
These days we get recipes from a myriad of different sources, not just cookery books, and the biggest provider is the internet. Recipe searches make up such a large part of Google’s traffic that they launched a dedicated recipe searching page – arguably a good or a bad thing. Smart phone and tablet apps are another area of growth. Nearly all Food media personalities have some form of cooking app out now.

Another approach is to catch us when we’re doing our weekly shop. The Delia & Heston campaign for Waitrose goes for the retail jugular with wipe-down cards right next to the ingredients you need. The rise of the food blogger has shaken things up considerably too. Plus there are the food magazines from both the BBC and other publishers.

Is the cookery book doomed?
So facing old enemies like TV shows and glossy magazines, as well as new foes like e-books, smart phone apps and websites, it would seem the writing is on the wall for cookery books. And yet... Jamie Oliver’s ‘30-Minute Meals’ was the fasting selling non-fiction book ever.

Silvia Crompton, Senior Editor at Random House Books thinks there is always a place for big names in the cookery book space. Like the top of the Premiership, it’s the familiar faces out in front, the ‘first name only club’: Gordon, Hugh, Nigella, Heston, Delia... The gap between their books and other food books is huge.

 

"However that’s not to say that new books can’t break through" she adds. "Hummingbird Bakery did well without TV show support", catching as it did the perfect cupcake wave in 2008. Silvia believes that lifestyle will remain big part of cookery books. "When you read something like Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries, you’re buying into Nigel’s philosophy, not just following a recipe."

Most cookery books seem to have left the kitchen table and taken up home on the coffee table. They’re almost too big or precious to use in the kitchen now. Chef Andrew Pern’s lovely book ‘Black Pudding & Fois Gras’ has a suede cover, while Heston’s ‘The Big Fat Duck Cookbook’ costs over £100. No splashes of grease on these beauties!

However publishers, such as Quadrille, are signing up food bloggers for their ‘new voices in food writing’ series, proving that a book deal is still something to covet and that there’s still a market for it.

Conclusion

 

As to what the future will look like, well maybe we’ll all become publishers in our own right using services like Lulu to print our own cookbooks as some people are already doing. Or perhaps we’ll all have e-book readers in the kitchen, and the printed book will go the way of the illuminated manuscript? Maybe future TV shows will let your smart TV talk wirelessly to your wi-fi printer and print all the recipes out as the credits roll. Who knows? I do know however that the future rarely turns out as people predict.


In the meantime, let us know if you prefer cookbooks, apps or recipes printed off the internet. Also have you ever cooked everything from one cookery book? Please write in the comments box below.

Andrew Webb is a writer and food journalist.

There's only one foolproof way of eeking the maximum out of a treasured and transient summer holiday: bring back the maximum stash of foodie-centric souvenirs from your holidays and revel in cooking with them. It’s the perfect excuse for re-living the culinary highlights of your hols.

Almonds for every course?

A word of caution though: many years ago, after an idyllic holiday in Majorca, I was completely besotted by the infinite versatility of cooking with almonds. So I decided to throw a dinner party serving Majorcan almonds for every course: white almond and garlic gazpacho; chicken with tomato and almond sauce; almond and orange cake with almond ice cream. I thought it was a triumph, my guests decided I was obsessive, got bored by almonds starring throughout the dinner and have teased me ever since.

Lucques olives from Provence

So as with most things in life, moderation is all. My haul this year has included fantastic, thick, plump anchovies from Collioure in South West France that are so delicious it is a shame to cook them. Instead, I've draped them over devilled eggs, added them to salade niçoise or buffalo mozzarella and tomato salad, and served them pincho-style on cocktail sticks with some equally wonderful provençal lucques olives and a chilled glass of rosé.

From Gouda in The Netherlands, I brought home a mini-round of aged Gouda cheese with a robust earthiness unlike anything I've bought in the UK and great waffle biscuits. I'm greedily anticipating my trip to Parma for their annual Festival del Prosciutto di Parma and will be sure to take a suitcase ample enough to bring back an outrageously large hunk of two-year-old Parmigiano Reggiano and (vacuum-packed) sweet, nutty Parma ham for serving with extravagant abandon.

An absolute must from Spain is saffron, always strands and never powder (which is frankly of horribly inferior quality). Look for saffron of consistent colour throughout in a sealed box: the best will be labelled from La Mancha. It has infinite uses beyond paella and is fantastic in custard, ice cream and shortbread.

Spices are the best, safest (and most compact) way of recapturing what's quintessential about many holiday destinations.  From Morocco return with ras-el-hanout, which translates as “top of the shop”. It’s a mixture of the very best spices - always including cardamom, cumin, coriander, chilli and up to fifty or more other spices. Watch where locals are buying from and don't be embarrassed to sniff it to ensure it is aromatic - and be wary of anything too cheap. Elsewhere Baharat from Turkey (made with allspice, cardamom, cassia bark, cumin and dried chilli) is great for rubbing into lamb or chicken. 

Unusual condiments travel well too. Kaya, a kind of coconut jam, from Singapore is great on pancakes with fruit and maple syrup. Although dulce con leche from Mexico is increasingly available in the UK, it's always pleasing to have something more authentic.

Whether you’ve opted for a staycation this year, or you’ve been jetting off around the world all summer, what’s the most exciting treat you’ve sampled from your travels, or indeed your colleagues’ or friends’ travels? Is there anything you regret bringing back?

Sudi Pigott is a food and travel writer.

In this week's The Food Programme, we consider what our kitchens reveal about us and the times we live in. Ten years ago new kitchens were designed as showy-offy, minimalist, modernist areas in which there was an almost theatrical attitude to the preparation of food. In the high street the current trend is for traditional-looking kitchens. But the new kitchen isn't frilly. It's not based on the country diary of an Edwardian lady. It's a much more streamlined version of the past. The kitchen is reflecting the kind of cooking we want to do. It's all about integrity and natural ingredients. Our kitchens are trying to be as ruggedly timeless as Rick Stein, or as easygoing as Jamie Oliver.

Kitchens as a design area are a very recent innovation. We only started considering what they should look like when we had to start using them - when we stopped either having servants, or when it stopped being the only room we lived in. We talk in the programme about how George IV (or Prince Regent as he was then) created the first ever show kitchen at the Brighton Pavilion.

Most of our housing stock was built between 1880-1930 and the kitchen was a small galley - either for the wife or the downstairs maid. There was never anything spoiling about it. By the 1930s it was the first area where modernism started sneaking in - the Bauhaus precepts and the Le Corbusian ideas - because it's the most practical space in the house.

Is this your perfect kitchen? Image credit: design*sponge

But it was my parents' generation that really discovered the kitchen. The kitchens that I grew up in - in the late 60s and early 70s - were resplendent, eye-catching, indulgent, designer spaces that were all about undulating, richly saturated wallpaper, avocado tiles and bits and pieces brought back from France. There was a link between that confident attitude and the kind of food that was being cooked in these kitchens. It was nourishing, outward-looking and inspired by travel.

Since then one of the problems we've got with our kitchens is that they've never been so big. We've had extensions, knocked walls through and annexed to create extremely large, unwieldy spaces. The kitchen has become the principle reception room, which is why you should decorate it as a sitting room and not as a machine for cooking.

So does a kitchen need to be clean and practical above all? Of course it needs to be ergonomic, but it also needs all the tricks of a sitting room. I'm a big fan of putting things like table lamps on kitchen surfaces so that you can knock off the overhead lighting when you no longer need it. I like wallpaper, art and mirrors in kitchens, taking good design aesthetics and principles from all around the house. It'll be a while before I start introducing shag-pile carpets into the kitchen, but I'll never say never! My kitchen has been recently pilloried by The Lady magazine as looking like an overdose of Berocca first thing in the morning. It's certainly very orange and very, very pink - maybe a reflection of my unusual family, and that we like our environment to be personality driven and unique.

Hopefully we're becoming less obsessed with the idea that where we live should be a monetary investment above all else. Maybe we can relax a little. We're stuck with our kitchens for a while and so we can let our hair down a bit. We don't have to worry what an estate agent will think if they come round and see that we've painted our kitchen Berocca and pink. Kitchens are now being created to give the ideal environment to relate to each other as a family unit.

What's your kitchen like and what do you think it says about you and the kind of food you like to eat? What would be your perfect kitchen design?

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is guest presenter on The Food Programme.