HIGH TIMBER: THE HEAT IS ON

Let battle commence.

I have, as I have been travelling the country, become a bit of a connoisseur of electric hand dryers. The ones I encounter at the shabby service stations, where I have to stop rather too frequently to point Percival at the porcelain, are of course rubbish with a slow stream of cool air doing little but delay you from buying an over priced hot chocolate from Costa.

In restaurants and pubs, however, the ante has very much been upped with a whole new breed of machines on show including the thus far daddy of them all, the Dyson Airblade, which leaves your mitts dry as a bone in a mere ten seconds (on show in the johns of St John, for the London centric) and without any call for that slightly comical need to push the button with your elbow to avoid touching with your wet hands.

But, the Dyson’s reign looks like it could be a short one. Now, hand dryer fans, there is the Xcelarator, a machine so powerful that it could crack the space/time continuum. A machine so powerful that my hands are still tingling some twelve hours after my last visit to the toilets of High Timber, a new South African owned steak house over looking the Thames near the Millennium Bridge. It is worth a visit just to give that a try although I suspect they will soon be forced to place a sign outside warning away the pregnant and cardio challenged.

To be fair, however, impressive as The Xcelarator was and lord help me it was impressive enough that not just a prostate the size of a grapefruit made me revisit more times than was strictly necessary, our main reason for being there was the hope that High Timber, in soft opening mode, would prove a welcome addition to London’s burgeoning steakhouse scene.

The menu is short, but shrieks of good provenance and the main events, the cow of course, is all sourced from that flat capped Cumbrian superstar farmer, Andrew Sharp who ages whole ribs for 28 days before they are butchered in house. The wine list, on the other hand, will be lengthy, given that the operation is, I think, a joint venture between one of the previous owners of Vivat Bacchus in Farringdon and Jordans, suppliers of some of the very best South African wines on offer in the U.K.

Starters are priced at £bugger me apiece and after nibbling on some slightly ordinary bread with excellent butter, we shared well presented plates of “Pulled Pork Shoulder of Middlewhite Pork” at £7.50 and “Chicken Liver and Foie Parfait” at £8

The former, a rillette by any other name, was in serious need of seasoning to bring flavour to the otherwise bland shards of meat and would also have benefited from the addition of some grilled bread to smear it on, and a few cornichons to add salty contrast.

The parfait, too lacked depth needing more of that salt stuff, but HP’s main concern was the lack of texture in the over whipped dish and the fact that the brioche crumbled to the touch like an ancient relic exposed to sunlight making the trip from plate to mouth almost impossible.

Good meat is not cheap and, although the £26/7 for our chosen cuts of rump and rib eye might make a few eyes water, it is consistent with the other worthwhile places in town. On the plus side, the steaks are served with a braised mushroom, vine tomatoes, watercress, onion rings and chips. On the downside, if you are charging top whack for your steaks, do you really need to extract another £1.50 for a small jar of sauce even if it does turn out to be one of the best béarnaise I have tried in a long time?

The steaks come served on a wooden board and both looked the part with the requested char. Both too were cooked rare as requested with only the distinct rings of colour inside suggesting that they needed to rest a little longer. It may be my preference for things aged and maggoty or the lack of fat on the rib eye, but while HP nodded in approval, I felt the steaks lacked flavour, needing perhaps another week of ageing.

Of the accompanying sides, plus points for the Chalk Valley watercress, which was delicious and peppery and for a meaty mushroom spiked with chilli. Marks off for serving tomatoes on their vine, which meant they exploded tomato water everywhere when I attempted to separate them. Ambivalence towards the bhaji style onions rings in a spicy breading and a scream of "for shame" for dreadful chips. Fat, undercooked, pale like a northerner on the first day of their holiday in Benidorm and, worst of all, with the skins still on. It still bemuses me how restaurants can do this and pass it off as a benefit. Ho hum.

Our wine was a thing of beauty and beautifully priced. Seeing the De Toren “Z” on the menu prompted me to order the Merlot based Bordeaux blend from the Den Dulk family in Stellenbosch, whose estate I was lucky enough to visit almost a year ago. Despite being a potent 14.5%, it was soft, elegant and fruity, worth every penny of the £29 being charged.

Desserts too are well priced at £5.50 and, although I have not quite figured out our waiter’s declaration that selections of sorbet and ice cream were ‘homemade but not made here” they were a suitable full stop to our meal.

With a soft opening discount of 50% from our food bill and the addition of a charge for very charming service, the bill came to £84 (nearer £120 without the discount), which brings it into line with Goodman and Hawksmoor.

It still has a way to go before it can mount a serious challenge to the two best steakhouses in London, but when it comes to hand dryers, High Timber is already in a league of its own.

THE REAL FOOD FESTIVAL & A REAL FOOD HERO

I am always happy to offer up a plug for nice people and for interesting food events and as the good folk at The Complete Media Group are some of the best in the business and The Real Food Festival is a great event, I am delighted to give both a mention.

This year’s Real Food Festival will take place at Earl’s Court from the 8th-10th May and as well as The Real Food Market, a farmer’s market featuring hundreds of the best producers from around the country, there will also be a daily cooking school, a Real Food Theatre with demonstrations from such luminaries as Raymond Blanc and even a special area for kids where they can make their own butter and presumably a hell of a mess while they are doing it.

The Complete Media Group who are helping to organise the event have offered me a couple of pairs of tickets to give away to DH readers, so, in the spirit of fairness, the first two people to mail me on doshermanos@doshermanos.co.uk can have them.

Even if you don’t win, it is still well worth going along and you may well see me there talking to the unsurprisingly few producers who still want anything to do with me after my visits for the EATING FOR BRITAIN trip.

While we are talking about real food, it is also worth mentioning again my good chum, Henrietta Lovell, owner of The Rare Tea Company, who last night received the award for Best Independent and Online Retailer at The Observer Food Monthly Award ceremony. Henrietta seeks out teas from all over the world with a particular passion for new growers from emerging nations such as Malawi. Having tried many of the teas on her list, I can confirm they are things of beauty and well worth seeking out.

Right, plugs over, back to being a self serving arse again.

EATING FOR BRITAIN: LANCASHIRE CHEESE AT LEAGRAM ORGANIC DAIRY

Bob Kitchen is shameless, totally and utterly shameless.

He is a shameless enough to sit beneath his own picture at Nigel Haworth’s excellent restaurant, The Three Fishes, shameless enough to eat off a place mat bearing the very same picture and shameless enough even to then order a pie made with his very own curd cheese.

You can forgive him though for this and, well just about anything, because Bob Kitchen is also one of the absolute favourites of all the people I have met so far on the EATING FOR BRITAIN trip and few people have worked so hard to promote their food to a wider audience. Witty and engaging (and did I mention shameless?) Bob is just the sort of person I was hoping to meet when I set out on my trip in search of Britain’s great food producers.

Bob, along with his daughter, Faye, runs Leagram’s Organic Dairy which has won umpteen prizes for its cheese making over the last fifteen years and, with his self designed portable cheese making demonstration unit has arguably done more to promote Lancashire cheese than anyone, even possibly more than the rightly famous Graham Kirkham.

Bob and Faye had invited me to join them for a day at their small dairy in the stupendously beautiful Ribble valley and, when I arrived, he was already hard at work making cheese while she was up to her eyes in paperwork.

I soon changed into white coat, apron and wellies and joined Bob and his two fellow cheese makers, Stephen and Robert as they kept watch over the four different types that were being prepared that day. The milk for Bob’s cheese comes from two farms and is pasteurised on site. He makes many cheeses, including a cheddar, red Leicester and a manchego style ewe’s milk cheese, however, it is for his Lancashire cheese and for his creamy, soft curd cheese that he has become so well known.

So, here is the thing. I have obviously eaten plenty of Lancashire cheese, usually the excellent Mrs Kirkham’s from Neal’s Yard Dairy and often with an Eccles Cake at St John. However, in my ignorance, I had no idea that there were three types of Lancashire cheese, officially designated “Crumbly” “Creamy” and “Tasty” each with its own different texture, each with its own different taste and each derived from a different starter culture.

In the main tank, holding some 3000 litres, Bob was making a crumbly variety, where the curds had been cut by hand and the whey drained off to be sold to a local pig farmer. While Stephen was busy “breaking” the drained curds with a large shovel, Bob turned his attention to a smaller vat where he showed me the cheddaring process of layering the curds in slabs on top of each other and Robert was expertly flipping small curd cheeses in their baskets so they could drain properly.

As for me, Bob had set me up with two small vats of milk on his demonstration stand so I could make my own cheese, in this case, a crumbly Lancashire and a Red Leicester, a semi-hard cheese tinted with annatto. After heating the milk to the required temperature, I added vegetarian rennet and then waited until the curds began to separate from the whey. Then it was a case of standing guard, stirring occasionally and testing regularly until the acidity was at the correct level, before removing the whey, slowing down the process with the addition of salt and packing the curds into small cheese moulds for pressing.

It sounds simple enough, but with so many other cheese being made and with so many different processes, it would be easy to take one’s eye off the ball. Bob’ however, makes sure that doesn’t happen and, with the intuition of one who has been making cheese all his life, he moved from one part of the creamery to another making sure that everything was in order.

Bob took me to lunch at The Three Fishes, one of the three restaurants owned by Nigel Haworth, guardian of traditional Lancastrian food. The menu sang out with local produce and every supplier had their own place of honour not only in photos on the walls but also on the reverse of the menu. A habit many other places could and should follow.

They know Bob there, of course, he supplies all of the restaurants with his cheeses and his soft, silky curds cheese is a particular favourite of Nigel’s.

He marched us to a quiet part of the restaurant and sat down beneath a picture of himself taken in the creamery. I imagine I was not the first to witness this nor to see him order a pie made with his curd cheese. He beamed with pride as it was placed before him at the same time as my slow cooked shin of local beef. He had every right to be proud. This is a superb cheese and one that had won many, many awards and my one small bite made this a dish I am planning to replicate as soon as possible.

Back at the dairy, the cheeses were being dipped in wax and stored in the cool room to age until ready. Bob packed an icebox with my own humble examples and slipped in a few of his curd cheeses too for me to take away. They have a while to go before being quite ready to try, but few things will be more pleasurable than cracking open a cheese made with my own fair hands at some point in the future.

That is, after all what the trip is all about. That, of course, and shameless but beguiling producers like Bob Kitchen.

EATING FOR BRITAIN: WITH ME LITTLE STICK OF BLACKPOOL ROCK

OK - in the latest of our series of popular culture questions, what instrument did Mr George Formby play??


Few food items raise more happy memories than the simple stick of seaside rock. Bringing back fond images of days spent on the beach, despite howling gales and sheeting rain, of sandwiches, which always became filled with sand no matter how carefully they had been stored and of thermos flasks filled with tea for the grown ups and lemon squash for the kids.

At the end of the holiday, when the fishing net on a bamboo pole lay broken and when the swimming mask was making its way out to sea after being lost during a daring dive exactly five minutes after purchase, everyone would need a reminder of the fun and japes of the last week as they squidged into the back of a Vauxhall Victor on the way back home.

That’s where seaside rock came in and I would cling determinedly to my 10p stick of sugar work with exotic names like Pwllheli studded along their length as we made our way back from a 1970's caravan holiday in North Wales to our home in Rotherham.

Move to the present when my memories have receded along with my gums and the thought of seaside rock had scarcely crossed my mind in nearly forty years until I began compiling the list of potential items for inclusion in EATING FOR BRITAIN. How could I not include me little stick of Blackpool rock? There are few things more British.

My research into rock manufacturers showed me that there were precious few of them left anymore, fallen by the wayside as such simple pleasures have been replaced with more modern offerings. Despite that, those who have persevered have prospered and, even in the quiet season, the factory unit housing The Coronation Rock Company, a few short minutes from the sea front, was bustling and the air was filled with the pleasing smell of cooking sugar.

They have been in business since 1927 and the workers still churn out thousands of tonnes of sugar work a year and, after I donned yet another white coat and hairnet, I was given a demonstration of the skills required to put those little letters all the way through our holiday treats.

The first thing that strikes you is that it is bloody hard work. The sugar is boiled and then coloured before being cut to size by two letter makers who have been at the centre of the business for over twenty- five years. Not only does each block weigh enough to make Geoff Capes raise a sweat, it is also hot as Hades. Too hot for me to try and handle, but for the two experts, hardly an issue as they quickly but carefully cut the sugar into barely recognisable shapes that would be come the final letters.

After wrapping the chosen coating around the letters, they hefted the proto-rock over to the one small piece of machinery used in the whole process, which rolls the sugar to give the unmistakeable twists and helps more workers lined up either side of a long table to roll out and cut to the required size.

It may be a business based in tradition, but everyone needs to face up to modern times and, as well as their traditional rock, The Coronation Rock Company produce over 1000 lines of sweets including, I was delighted to see, hemp flavoured rock with the word “Ganja” all the way through it, which unsurprisingly nearly all get exported to Amsterdam.

As I was about to leave, I was presented with a sample of the rock I had just seen being made, still warm to the touch. I broke off a small chunck to suck on. Just as I remember, it brought memories flooding back, but it also reminded me of the £3000 I spent having my teeth fixed when I turned 40 and I put the rest back in the boot of my car for another day.

On my way out of Blackpool to my next port of call, I went in search of a totally new food item, well to me at least, Parch Peas. Apparently, once popular throughout Lancashire, in times of famine, when Maple peas, used as ballast on board incoming ships, were soaked in water and then cooked or “parched” until soft and then served with salt and vinegar as a source of protein.

There are few places now who still sell them. A stall on Preston Market apparently does a roaring weekend trade, but the good people at Coronation Rock pointed me towards Fleetwood, about ten miles up the coast from Blackpool and a small, old fashioned sweet shop called Rimmers.

They had just finished cooking them as I entered the shop and I came away with a 25p twist to munch on as I drove back towards Chipping. Not bad at all, like salty lentils, cooked until they still retain a slight crunch. Hardly a life changing experience but, after spending the morning trying something from my childhood, it was good to find something new and unique to the area.

Talking of which, next stop Lancashire Cheese.

EATING FOR BRITAIN: BLACK PUDDING AND BURDOCK

If Hot Pot and Eccles cakes were high on the list of dishes to search for in Lancashire, they still had to doff a flat cap to the daddy of them all, the Lancashire black pudding, easily one of the true proofs of the existence of a loving god.

With its perfect combination of blood, barley, spices and fat, the Lancashire version or more specifically those made in the environs of Bury ranks up there with my very favourite foods in the world.

Nearly two years ago, I visited The Bury Black Pudding Co during the early stages of Eat My Globe. It was a memorable visit and the taste and smell of a pudding, straight from the boiler and sliced in half remains one of my favourite memories.

So, it took little to convince me that I should add the Black Pudding to my list for Eating For Britain and I began to research other possible makers. All roads seemed to lead to Haslingden, a few miles outside Bury itself and to an official Knight of The Boudin, Andy Holt and The Real Lancashire Black Pudding Co

If there are any donkeys in Haslingden with hind legs, I would be very surprised. Andy Holt with his broad Lancastrian accent admitted to being euphemistically “under the weather” but still managed to talk animatedly about his favourite subject, black puddings.

It’s not just the Lancashire version, which fascinates him. He has done considerable research tracing the history of the blood sausage back to its first mention in Homer’s Illiad when Agamemnon’s army is described as being fed on “blood and onions” to keep them strong.

Alongside the research, Andy also collects blood sausage recipes from around the world and shared with me his knowledge of the different varieties before coming back to his own award winning version, a pudding that, last year won Best Black Pudding in Britain for the umpteenth time.

Although former butcher Andy has been running R.S Ireland since the early 1990’s, the recipe dates back to the late 1800’s and has changed little since then even if some of the ingredients now have to be sourced abroad for consistency. Blood, dried from Belgium, fat from Holland and spices from all over the place. It was a story I had heard before at The Bury Black Pudding Co who also would have loved to source locally, but needed to ensure a regular supply of the right quality ingredients.

The method, however, has changed little in the last hundred years with the barley being soaked, mixed with the blood, fat and spices before being piped into casings made of sow or ox stomach. The resulting sausages are tied and then boiled and dipped in water with soda crystals before being hung in traditional nets to dry. Er, that’s about it.

But, like all seemingly simple things, there is a great art involved, the right consistency of the blood, the right amount of meat in the casing, the right temperature of the water for boiling and, of course, the right spicing.

After we had taken our tour of the production facility, Andy took me back to the small staff kitchen and cut one of the fresh puddings in half for me to try. It is not hard to see why his walls are covered in awards. It is a thing of beauty, spicy and, he pointed out, complete with the seven large blobs of fat that is the pre-requisite of the true Bury black pud.

In the spirit of innovation, I also tried other puddings from Andy’s range. A Irish white pudding, a pudding spiced with chilli and, even Lord help me, a vegetarian black pudding, which he created for fun but has now become one of his fastest sellers.

After I left Andy, with a bag of puddings in hand, naturally, it was time to head off in search of a taste of my childhood, Dandelion & Burdock.

In the early part of the 20th Century, Lancashire was the spiritual home of the temperance movement. Across the county, herbalists began to create space in their stores to offer non-alcoholic drinks with supposed nutritional value. Sarsaparilla was a favourite, inspired by a similar drink in the US and dandelion & burdock was another with its much-vaunted benefits of detoxification. As well as serving them in the shops, they began to create cordials for customers to take away and dilute at home.

Joseph Mawson took over the family business in the 1960’s at the time when it was changing from a herbalist to a health food store, but it was his son, Nigel who decided to revive the family recipe for Sarsaparilla to give away during the store’s centenary. So popular was the drink that he was urged to make it on a commercial basis and Mawson’s Traditional Drinks Co was born.

Now they produce a wide range of old fashioned drinks in old fashioned packaging and, as I sat with them, they plopped open a bottle of dandelion & burdock for me to sip on as Joseph filled me in on the history.

My first taste transported me back nearly forty years, to when the “pop man” used to call to our house in Rotherham every Tuesday in his Co-op milk float delivering sixpenny bottles of fizzy drink. We would clamour for lurid orangeade, lemonade that had been no closer to a lemon than I have to the moon and, best of all, the dandelion & burdock with its unique flavour.

Mawson’s drinks are now available nationwide and are even sold at The Imperial War museum’s shops. They are well worth seeking out, as indeed are the superb black puddings made by Andy Holt at The real Lancashire Black Pudding Co.

LA BUVETTE: REFRESHING RICHMOND

I last visited Richmond about ten years ago. I’d had a couple of drinks and a meal with friends and then went back to the station to get a taxi home. It was a Saturday night and to say the centre of Richmond was a bit of a war zone was an understatement. It was like one of those reality programs about Boozy Britain. Only worse.

The main drag became an impromptu football pitch, blokes were involved in random skirmishes, girls were either crying or barfing. All great fun, especially if you were a twenty-something larger lout but for someone as urbane as myself somewhat unedifying. Naturally, I came through the maelstrom unscathed – when you hit forty you become invisible to the youth.

If anything Richmond has become even more chav central during the intervening years with a dreary selection of chains and populated by dull-eyed, mouth-breathers, presumably just in from neighbouring Feltham or Hounslow on the shoplifter special. And if you’ve got a car you’ll feel right at home here, there’s hundreds of them, all tail-backed in a ring around the centre.

Slap-bang in the middle of all this ugliness, a little like Stott Hall Farm between the lanes of the M62, is a little island of calm and loveliness. Like L’Absinthe which I visited a few weeks ago, La Buvette is a small but perfectly formed French-style Bistrot.

I say French-style because I have no idea what real French Bistrots are like these days, but the menu was written in a sort Franglais and the attractive, blond waitresses sounded French, which was good enough for me (especially, the French waitresses bit).

When dining out you can encounter two types of menu. There’s the menu where your choices become an exercise in damage limitation i.e. what’s the least grim-sounding dish. Then there’s the menu where one is tempted to order extra dishes just because everything sounds so good.

Happily, La Buvette’s menu fell into the latter camp. Having said that, I had to resist the urge to over-order. Maintaining a body like mine in peak condition sometimes requires sacrifices. However, half a bottle of Champagne and some baguette to nibble on provided some compensation.

They operate a Prix Fixe at all mealtimes which seems quite cheap but you do have to factor in the 12.5% service, the odd supplement and the fact you’ll probably want a glass of wine or two which can push the bill up a bit. Mind you, with cooking this good I think it’s still good value.

A salad of Frisée with Lardons and a Poached Egg was indicative of the style of cooking here: simple but very well executed. If I was making this at home I would be tempted to pile on extra ingredients like, say Black Pudding or Croutons, but they got it absolutely spot-on here and the combination of good bacon, accurately dressed leaves (I can never get my dressings to taste like this) and a perfectly cooked egg was a killer.

Onglet could have done with a tad more of a char but was nevertheless cooked properly rare and was dense and very meaty. A Mache and Shallot salad had, yet another well-judged dressing. Chips tasted brought-in but were nicely cooked. As classic a French bistrot dish as you’re going to get, I’d wager.

The Almond Ice Cream had a taste which reminded me of a solid version of Amaretto with Ice. If you’re a fan of the liqueur then you’d love this. The texture was pretty much perfect.

A double Espresso wasn’t much cop and the PFs were a little sugary (aren’t they always ?) but these were minor quibbles considering all the good stuff that had gone before.

The restaurant has apparently been open for about five years so it’s not much of a secret and on my visit was full of locals, mostly an older bunch, and a few families, all thoroughly enjoying themselves – as did I. Like L’Absinthe, it’s probably not worth crossing London to get to but I suspect its existence means there’s probably a similar little joint very near to you. If it’s anything like La Buvette go there now. Places like this deserve to survive.