Blow Up Food

There are a lot of pesto recipes out there, and I’ve tried them all: with/ without pecorino; with butter instead of olive oil (thanks for nothing Matthew Fort); toasting the pine nuts; roasting the garlic… I even went through a long period of persisting with the pestle and mortar after reading an article about the pesto championship in Liguria that made me feel a bit inadequate - but to be honest it just took too bloody long. Pesto should really shouldn’t take longer to make than your pasta takes to boil (6-7 mins), so resorting to a hand blender is no bad thing (sorry if I have any Italian readers. I’m so sorry).

My many experiments have eventually resulted in a recipe I love, and I’ve acquired a few tips along the way that are worth sharing:
1) Don’t toast the pine nuts. You lose a bit of that lovely sweetness that the pine nuts add
2) Likewise, don’t cook the garlic, although it’s good to be frugal with it. I love garlic, but once it gets blended it can really overpower the sauce and throw the balance off
3) Invest in a really good extra virgin olive oil - bad olive oil makes for bad food
4) Trust your own tastebuds. If there’s not enough basil, add a load more. Basil’s strength varies hugely depending on the season, so you may need more in colder months
4) This is the important one - don’t mix your pesto into the pasta whilst it’s in your saucepan. Mix the pesto and pasta together in a large cold bowl. The hot saucepan will damage the delicate basil flavour and you’ll be left disappointed after your hard work to make a brilliant sauce. I’m not kidding when I say this really makes a difference - this is my super-duper, top tip, and you are welcome.

INGREDIENTS
1 large basil plant (or two little ones)
½ garlic clove
70g pine nuts (reserve a few extra to top your dish)
Finely grated vegetarian hard cheese
A pinch of sea salt
A big glug of extra virgin olive oil
(I know these are imprecise, but you need to taste and mix until you’re happy)

RECIPE
Add the basil leaves, the pine nuts, a big glug of olive oil, the salt and the garlic to a large bowl. Blend with a hand blender until the consistency is nearly smooth (you don’t want soup, but you don’t want big unblended chunks of garlic or nut either).
Grate in the cheese and mix with a spatula. Taste and season again with more cheese or salt if needed. Add a little more olive oil if the mixture is a bit stiff. It’s your dinner so make sure you’re happy with the balance.

Tip your drained pasta (gnocchi, linguine, trofie - whatever your favourite is) into the bowl of pesto and mix with your spatula. Sprinkle in a few more pine nuts and serve with a twist of black pepper.

— Guest post by Gregory Povey, @topfife.

Last week, I bought Jaq Jerusalem, the new book by Yotam Ottolenghi (and Sami Tamimi). It’s a love letter to Jerusalem, taking in Israeli and Arab dishes, and covering a lot of the influences from the Mediterranean — about 60-70% of which is vegetarian or vegetable-based.

We’ve been a fan of Middle Eastern and Jewish-heritage food for a long time. Mostly through a lot of obvious things - rice dishes, lamb (me), hummous, falafel, boregi, pickles, baklava - and their massive love of salt. Oh, the salt. It’s a bit tricky, as there is obviously a lot of food that falls so far outside the remit of ‘vegetarian’ as to not be approachable, but we’re trying. This week we’ve tried a few - imam bayildi, dukkah, and flatbreads.

The flatbreads present another tiny problem as Jaq is experimenting with a wheat-free diet. Most other flours don’t seem to have the strength of wheat, but spelt is working out well. It’s got a slightly earthier, wholemeal flavour to it, but it’s light enough to fill in for white wheat flour.

A look in Ottolenghi’s Plenty and a couple of tweaks, leads us to Yoghurt & Spelt Flatbreads.

RECIPE:

• 500g spelt flour (probably wheat, if you like)
• 500g low-fat Greek yoghurt (TOTAL 2% from FAGE is the best greek yoghurt we’ve found in supermarkets)
• 1tsp olive oil
• 1tsp baking powder (a healthy 1 tsp)
• ½tsp salt
• Chopped coriander (optional)

Set aside the yoghurt in a bowl and mix in the olive oil. This will loosen the yoghurt up a little and provide a bit of lubricant when kneading.

Add the baking powder and salt to the flour and blend together. Scoop the yoghurt on top of the flour, before making a dough with your hands. This will get sticky. If it’s too dry, add some extra yoghurt until you’re happy with the texture.

Turn out onto your work surface (it doesn’t need to be floured, really) and work the dough. Now spend a good few minutes of kneading, it will be a proper heel-of-the-hand kneading job and your triceps will benefit. (see top image)

Before long, you’ll have a luxurious, stretchy dough with a smooth texture.

Wrap it up in cling film and stick it in the fridge for about an hour, or upto a few days. The longer you leave it, the more tangy yoghurt flavour you will have in your final bread.

When you want to make the flatbreads, make a long roll on a floured surface and cut it up into equal sections. Make a ball out of each section, then roll them to about about ½ inch thick - until they look like flatbreads - and put them to the side.

There are now two options of how to cook them:

1. Pan Fried.
This will give you a flatter, paratha-like flatbread with a crispier texture.

Heat up a pan and add some olive oil. Lay your flatdough into the pan and let it cook. When bubble start to appear, turn it over. Cook for ~90 seconds each side, or until you’re happy with the colour and satisfied that the dough is cooked.

2. Baked.
This will give a lighter, puffed-up bread along the lines of a pitta.

Pre-heat the oven to about 200dC and place the flatbread dough on a floured tray mid-high in the oven. If you’ve got a pizza stone, use that. After about 5 minutes, your dough should be puffed up and proud like a morning cockerel. Turn the bread over and leave for another five minutes.

Take out, let it cool a tiny bit, then scoop up some tahini, olive oil & dukkah, or a load of tzatziki.