How to cook onions and how recipes lie to us

How to Cook Onions and How Recipes Lie

Gavin Wren Basic Ingredients, Food Education, Food Techniques, Writing

Today I’m looking at how cooks and chefs around the world have lied to us about how to cook onions, misusing terms like sauté, caramelise, sweat and fry along with frankly ridiculous suggestions of cooking times. So if you really want to know your onions, read on, and I will expose the real truth about onions. Hold the Front Page! It’s time for a News of the World style exposé of the food world. Time …

How to make authentic pizza sauce with just three ingredients, the best tomatoes you can get, ideally San Marzano, plus garlic and extra virgin olive oil all lightly infused together make the best genuine italian pizza sauce for your homemade pizzas.

Pizza Sauce

Gavin Wren Basic Ingredients, Food Techniques, Main Dishes, Recipes

Don’t listen to them. So the internet has a million and one recipes for pizza sauce. So what. They’re all wrong and I’m right, so listen carefully. I’m going to keep this simple, as it should be. You don’t need sugar, you don’t need herbs. You don’t need vinegar either. Pizza is a simple pleasure, the sauce should reflect that ideology. There’s one thing to consider very seriously when making simple food, which is quality …

Homemade yoghurt video

Homemade Yoghurt Video!

Gavin Wren Basic Ingredients, Food Techniques, Recipes, Writing, YouTube Food Videos

How to make Yoghurt. Last year I created an information packed blog post about how to make yoghurt at home, where I tested a few different techniques that I had read about online to see which one was best. It turned out that they were mostly awful for an Englishman living in London in the cold, early spring, I guess that yoghurt making is easier in warmer climates. One method did shine out as being …

rye croutons with garlic and mustard

Rye Croutons with Garlic and Mustard – Video Recipe

Gavin Wren Basic Ingredients, Recipes, Soup, Vegetarian, Writing, YouTube Food Videos

Add Some crunch to your lunch Croutons are those crunchy, munchy accoutrements of soup which I have to say, rarely get much sway from me. They seemed like an unnecessary adornment to my soup, because I’m often going to get a large doorstep of toasted bread to suck the liquid life out of my soup and transfer it into my mouth, or I just want to eat/drink/slurp the soup, so adding some small bits of …

olio di peperoncino chilli oil

Olio di peperoncino chilli oil

Gavin Wren Basic Ingredients, Food Techniques, Recipes, Writing

I’ve visited Italy twice in my life, or even three times if you count the occasion that I arrived at Milan after a few months in South East Asia, then immediately booked myself onto the next flight to London without leaving the airport because my ‘friend’ stood me up, hence I decided to simply go home instead. Aside from that minor dalliance with Milan airport which I’ll choose to ignore in the context of this …

how to make gravadlax

How to make gravadlax

Gavin Wren Basic Ingredients, Fish & Shellfish, Food Techniques, Main Dishes, Recipes, Small Bites, Writing

Today I’m talking about gravlax, or gravalax, or gravadlax, or even Gravad laks depending on where you are, who you are and why you’re here. There might be other spellings that I’m missing out, but so far I’ve covered Norwegian, Swedish and Danish as well as the slightly confused situation in England where it seems to go under a few of those names. However you spell it, this is an absolute peach of a recipe, …