Brill roe with January King cabbage, anchovy mayonnaise, chantarelles, sage and butter

This is a slightly random, ‘bonus’ recipe that came about from the brill used in the last recipe on this blog. Whilst lifting the fillets from the massive fish, I noticed that some fairly impressive roes were concealed beneath the flesh. Usually fresh roes are not something that massively stirs my appetite, and certainly at work only a tiny minority of customers request them. But because of how special and expensive the fish that I was working with was, I was determined to use as much of it as possible. Having never cooked with fresh roes before, I wasn’t quite sure quite how to tackle them. Traditionally you are told to blanch them in water, but this normally applied to huge, bulging cod roes and the idea of anaemic, grey, veiny tubes didn’t really appeal. Instead I decided to cure them for a couple of hours in an attempt to firm them up slightly and reinforce the flavour. Having had no previous experience of handing these roes in the kitchen, I have no idea as to whether this made much different. But I was really satisfied with what turned into a really delicious plate of food. 

 
Making it was a bit of a nightmare though. The cooking process was really quick and simple, but I was fast running out of light. And as a food blogger there is nothing more frustrating that cooking up something only for it to get dark and the photos to look rubbish. I had already made the dish that I had intended for the day, last week’s recipe, and it was touch and go whether the light would hold out for much longer. The kitchen was a mess, heaped with leftover plates and extra ingredients. But I was spurred to seize the moment; I wouldn’t get another chance to cook with the roes so decided to risk it. It was certainly not the most therapeutic bit of cooking I’ve ever done, mostly involving crashing around the kitchen like a bull in a china shop, but in the end I just managed to scrape it.
 
Deciding what to accompany the roes with was also a bit of guesswork. I hadn’t planned to cook another recipe for this blog, so none of the usual thought had gone into it. All I had was what was laying around in the kitchen. I had bought a beautiful purple and green January King cabbage from the Quality Chop Shop that morning along with some chantarelle mushrooms. These were impulse buys that I thought I would use in my everyday cooking, but they were needed far sooner than anticipated. I always find sauces like mayonnaise or emulsions great in tying everything all together; the anchovies in this batch proved great companions with the mushrooms, rosemary and cabbage.
 
Serves 2
 
Ingredients:
 
For the brill roe cure:
 
2 large brill roes 
200g sugar 
200g salt 
1 lemon, zest only 
3 sprigs of rosemary
 
To cook the brill roes:
 
2 good knobs of butter 
12 sage leaves 
3 sprigs of rosemary 
1 clove of garlic, lightly crushed 
A handful of chantarelle mushrooms, cleaned and trimmed
 
For the anchovy mayonnaise:
 
1 egg yolk 
4 anchovy fillets 
½ a lemon, juice only 
½ tsp Dijon mustard 
A splash of white wine vinegar 
200ml vegetable oil
 
For the King cabbage:
 
4 large leaves from a January King cabbage, torn 
A squeeze of lemon juice
 
To finish:
 
2 thin slices of sourdough

 
Lightly cure the brill roes to start off with. Pour the sugar, salt, rosemary and lemon zest into a food processor and finely chop to combine. Tip half into a shallow dish, then place the fresh brill roes on top. Cover with the second half of the cure, then cover and refrigerate for 2 hours. Once cured, gently remove the roes from the dish and rinse before patting dry. 

 
Pre-heat the oven to 200⁰C.
 
For the anchovy mayonnaise, put the egg yolk, mustard, vinegar, black pepper and anchovies into a small food processor and combine well. With the engine still running, slowly pour the oil in until fully emulsified. Stir in the lemon juice and taste for seasoning. Spoon into a plastic bottle.
 
Scatter the pieces of January King onto a baking tray and toss in olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast for 6-8 minutes, or until starting to char and crisp at the edges. squeeze over the lemon juice and set aside.

 
Set a large frying pan on a medium-high heat. Add the butter and a tablespoon of olive oil along with the garlic, rosemary and sage. When hot, fry the roes for about 2 minutes on each side, basting continuously. Add the chantarelles for the last couple of minutes. Allow the butter to go a rich ‘nut brown’ colour.
 
While the roes are cooking, grill the thin sourdough slices with a little oil and salt until toasted.
 
To serve, put one slice of the sourdough on each plate and dot on 5 or 6 blobs of the mayonnaise. Add the roes and a few of the cabbage leaves, then arrange some of the mushrooms and sage leaves around the plate. Finish with a generous amount of the brown butter and a crack of pepper.

Spaghetti Vongole

Just like the seared fillet recipe in the last post, vongole is as simple as can be but is a firm favourite in our flat. When Katie went away recently with work, I asked what she wanted me to make for her return. Her quick reply was “vongole!”, so it had to be just that. I was kind of disappointed at first, as I was thinking of something luxurious and intricate that I would spend the whole day cooking. I thought and thought of ways that I could elevate the simple pasta dish to a higher lever; adding langoustines, lobster, a shellfish sauce etc, but anything that I wanted to do took away from the distinctive clean tastes of sweet clams, dry wine, garlic, chilli and lemon. And not a lot else. Soon I had gone full circle and simply wanted to try and maximise those basic flavours. The fact of the matter is a good vongole on a warm evening is one of the best things that you can eat. It’s one of those dishes that can instantly make you feel like you’re on holiday.

The only extra thing that I did was make the pasta myself. Most of the time I just snip off the top of a packet of dried pasta and the dish is ready in minutes, but I wanted to add that special touch. I have met many people who snub the idea of homemade pasta and think it’s a waste of time, but for me the taste and texture that you can achieve by making it fresh can make even the simplest dishes incredible. And it really doesn’t take that long once you get the hang of it. You can even freeze the dough then simply thaw out and roll!

I like my finished vongole to be quite winey and lemony to taste, so feel free to adjust the levels to your taste.

Serves 2-3 as a main course:

For the sauce:

800g live clams
1.5 glasses dry white wine
2 shallots, very finely chopped
1 red chilli, very finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, very finely chopped
4 tbsp flat leaf parsley, very finely chopped

2 lemons, juice only
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

For the pasta:

400g ’00’ grade flour
4 eggs
2 tbsp olive oil
Large pinch of Salt


To make the pasta, combine all of the ingredients in a food processor and blitz until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Tip out onto a clean surface and knead together for 5-10 minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic in texture. It should be soft but not sticky. Wrap well with cling film and allow to rest for at least half an hour, preferably longer.

Once rested, unwrap and roll through a pasta machine around 10 times at the widest setting, folding after each pass. This will make the dough much easier to work with. Next pass the dough through the narrower settings, one at a time until the second thinnest (number 5 on a Imperia machine). You should have a long sheet of thin pasta. Cut the sheet to the length that you want the spaghetti to be, then cut using the spaghetti attachment. Flour the cut pasta lightly and lay on a rack, keeping the strands as separate as possible. Set aside until needed.

Fill a large saucepan with water, add a good amount of salt and bring to the boil.

Heat a large frying pan or skillet to a medium temperature and add 2 tbsp of olive oil. Fry the shallot, garlic and chilli for a couple of minutes until softened, seasoning as you go. Turn the heat up slightly, add the white wine and bring to the boil. When the alcohol has burned off tip in the clams and cover the pan with a lid. Shake the pan gently and keep covered until the clams have opened, about 2-3 minutes.

While the clams have been cooking for a minute add your pasta to the saucepan of boiling water. Cook for 1-2 minutes, tasting a strand occasionally to make sure that it is al dente.

You want to try and time it so that the clams and pasta cook at the same time.

Once the clams have opened, transfer the cooked pasta into the pan using some tongs, along with 3 tbsp of the cooking water. Combine well, agitating the pasta to release to gluten and thicken the sauce. Add the juice of one lemon, the parsley, salt and pepper and a good glug of olive oil and combine again. Taste to make sure that there is enough seasoning and lemon.

Spoon into shallow bowls and squeeze some more lemon over the top, along with a drizzle of olive oil and some cracked pepper. Simple as that!

Home-smoked sardines with clams, leeks, crispy cavolo nero and saffron and lemon mayonnaise

So Katie goes away for a few days with work, and in that time the kitchen somehow sprouted a makeshift smoker. And I don’t know why I haven’t done it before! 

This was a very spontaneously thought out and prepared lunch. All I knew that day was that I wanted to make something with sardines, but for the life of me I couldn’t decide on what to do with them. I had thought of curing them in blackcurrant juice, which might have looked beautiful but tasted frankly disgusting, or simply grilling them, which wouldn’t have been very original for me. It got to the point where I was cycling back from the fishmongers with a bag of fish and still didn’t know their fate. And then the idea of smoking them came into my head. 

Although I like to stretch myself and try as many different cooking techniques as I can, I have always thought that smoking was a step too far for the amateur cook. Only spending vast amounts of money on a purposely built, outdoor smoker would make this possible, and I had one scribbled down next to a sous-vide machine and double oven on my unrealistic wish list. But although cold-smokers might be a little more difficult to recreate, a makeshift hot-smoker turned out to be a doddle to make. Just make sure you open the windows and turn the extraction fan on! Anyone really interested in homemade methods such as this should check out the writing of Tim Haywood. Not only is it funny, but the things that he makes with often household items are brilliant and inspiring. 

I thought that I would be able to make a smoker out of a very deep oven tray with a cooling rack suspended above, all sealed up with trusty foil. And I was kind of amazed that it worked, and that I didn’t burn down the flat in the process! The fish really was delicious, lovely and moist in the middle and smokey on the outside. As for the flavour of the smoke, I just experimented with a mixture of thyme, pink peppercorns, rice and sugar. This might not be the right thing to use for seasoned smokers, but it worked just fine for this dish. I only wanted to lightly smoke the fish, but you could leave them in for longer to achieve a crispier, stronger result. Instead I finished the cooking with a blowtorch to crisp up the skin.  It was a treat, and could well be the start of a whole lot of experimentation. 

The rest of the dish was formed by things I was lucky enough to have at home. I had clams in the fridge for a meal the next night, and the mayonnaise was made out of store cupboard ingredients. All in all it took me about half an hour, although the kitchen was a proper mess by the end!

Serves 2 for lunch

Ingredients:

For the sardines: 

3 whole sardines, scaled and gutted

Salt and pepper

Olive oil

For the smoker:

3 large handfuls of rice

1 large bunch of thyme

2 tbsp pink peppercorns

2 tbsp caster sugar

For the clams:

30 clams, cleaned of grit

1 glass dry white wine

For the steamed leeks:

2 young leeks, washed and cut into long rounds

1 tsp butter

Salt and pepper

For the crispy cavolo nero:

3 leaves cavolo nero, shredded finely

3 tbsp olive oil

Salt and pepper

1/4 nutmeg

1 lemon, zest only

Salt and pepper

For the saffron and lemon mayonnaise:

2 egg yolks

1/2 level tsp english mustard

1 garlic clove

Splash white wine vinegar

Small pinch saffron

300ml rapeseed oil

1-2 lemons, juice only

Salt and pepper

First get the smoker ready. Line the bottom of a deep oven tray with foil and scatter over the rice, thyme, pepper and sugar. Put a shallow bowl with a little water in at each end, and use these to support a cooling rack a couple of inches above the base. Create a lid out of a few sheets of tin foil, making sure that it will seal properly and sit a couple of inches above the cooling rack. Set aside for lighting later.

Now make the mayonnaise. Add the garlic clove, salt and pepper to a food processor with a small bowl and blitz well. Top up with the mustard, vinegar, saffron and egg yolks and mix again until well combined and very frothy. Leaving the mixer on, pour in the oil in a very slow trickle, getting steadier as you reach the end. The mayonnaise should be very thick and emulsified. Squeeze in the juice of one lemon, mix again and taste. Add more lemon and seasoning as required, then transfer to a squeezy bottle. 

Prepare the sardines by removing the head, cutting open the belly cavity and removing any innards. The next step is to butterfly the fish by carefully running the tip of a sharp knife between the fine ribcage and the flesh on each side, then slowly easing the backbone free with your fingers. Cut them at the tale end so you are left with both fillets connected and bone free. Cut into separate fillets and put onto a plate. The key with handling the sardines is to be very gentle as the skin and flesh tears really easily. 

Put the oil for the cavolo nero into a medium frying pan and set to a medium-high heat. When hot, add the shredded leaves with the lemon zest and seasoning. Cook for a minute or two, of until very crispy, then remove to a plate lined with kitchen roll. Grate over the nutmeg, mix well and check the seasoning. Set aside. 

Heat a medium saucepan to a medium-high temperature. When hot, add the clams and cook in the dry pan for a couple of seconds before adding the white wine. Cover the bubbling pan tightly and gently shake a couple of times. Cook until the clam shells open, about 2-3 minutes, then transer to a bowl. Remove the clams from the shells with a spoon, keeping about ten of the shell halves for plating up. Set aside. 

Half-fill a saucepan with a steaming attachment with salted water and bring to the boil. 

When the water is nearly boiling, start up the smoker. Run a blowtorch over thyme and rice mixture in the bottom of the oven tray until charred and smoking, then put the tray on the hob over a medium heat and seal with the foil. While the smoker is heating up, dry the outside of the sardines with kitchen paper, season well and rub with a small amount of oil. When the smoker is hot and the cooling rack is up to temperature, carefully lay each fillet skin down on the rack and quickly reseal the edges. Check after 3-4 minutes; the fish should be cooked and the skin starting to turn a golden colour. Carefully remove the fillets from the rack using a palette knife and place skin up on a plate. Using the blowtorch, run the flame over the fillets until the skin starts to crisp up. 

While the fish is smoking, steam the leeks for 3-4 minutes or until jest tender. When cooked, brush with a little butter and season. 

To plate up, position 5-6 pieces of leek onto each plate. Lay three sardine fillets per portion, and scatter some of the crispy cavolo nero around the plate. Arrange the clams over the top, leaving some of them in their shells, then dot the mayonnaise in the gaps.