HOME COOKING: OI! TWO MORE LAMB BHUNAS HERE

In the last few weeks, as much for my own enjoyment as any other reason, I have been undertaking research into the all too familiar cast of dishes that appear on British curry houses.

While some of these dishes, like the splendid Chicken Tikka Masala, may be truly British inventions, others, like the Vindaloo, the Korma, the Dopiaza and the Phaal do have roots in dishes that can be found on the Indian subcontinent, even if the curry house versions may be entirely unrecognisable to anyone from India.

Although, the versions of these dishes that can found in the Taj Mahal's and Standard Tandoori's of Blighty can be delicious, if well made, there is usually a “one sauce fits all” appearance to them that pays testament to the pre-preparation required in any restaurant and the lack of authenticity of curry house versions.

So, in an attempt to rectify this and get to the source of the sauce, I am going to spend the next few weeks in my kitchen attempting to find authentic recipes for those dishes we love so much and to present them on DH with a little cultural background to give added spice.

To begin, the Bhuna. It’s a rich, dark, spicy and thick dish that has become one of the most popular of Indian restaurant staples. It has its origins in North East India and the areas of Bengal and what is now Bangladesh to thank for its popularity in UK curry houses.

In the early 1950’s, large numbers of immigrants from Pakistan, East Pakistan (Bangladesh) and India began to flow into the United Kingdom. Initially they came to fill roles in the ship building, textile and steel industries and graduated towards areas like West Yorkshire, Scotland and Lancashire. Soon, however, a number of these new immigrants began opening restaurants. At first these modest places were aimed at feeding their fellow immigrants, yearning for a taste of the homeland. However, they soon became popular with the local community and, as their popularity spread, so too the dishes became modified to widen their appeal.

The word Bhuna, I am told, literally means to fry and refers to a process where spices or spice pastes were fried to release their oils before meat (usually goat) was added and then allowed to cook in its own juices and the spices.

Recipes vary, but my own version involves the laborious, but entirely worth the effort, approach of marinating cubes of lamb in spices, onion paste, ginger, garlic, chilli, methi (fenugreek) leaf and a little yoghurt for a couple of hours before then cooking them down in their own juices, with sliced onions and tomato until they are covered in a rich, dark, spicy coating.

The recipe below certainly takes a bit of effort, as so many good recipes do, but it is definitely worth trying if you want to experience an authentic version of a curry house classic.

INGREDIENTS
3lbs Lamb (I used cubed lamb leg)
1 Large White Onion
4 Fresh Green Chillies
2 Inches Fresh Ginger (Peeled)
5 Cloves Garlic (Peeled)
1 12oz Can Plum Tomatoes (Drained and chopped)
3 Tbsp Whole Milk Yoghurt
1 Tsp Coriander Powder
1 Tsp Hot Chilli Powder
1 Tsp Salt
1 Tsp Sugar
1 Tsp Cumin Powder
1 Tsp Turmeric
1 Tsp White Pepper
½ Cup Fenugreek Leaf (Fresh if you can find them, but dried worked well for me)
1 Stick Cinnamon
4 Green Cardamom Pods
4 Cloves
4 Dried Red Chillies (try and use Kasmiri Chillies if you can find them. They add a great red colour without adding to the heat too much)
¼ Cup Vegetable Oil
Water

METHOD
Blend half the onion into a fine paste.
Make a fine paste of the fresh green chillies, ginger and garlic.
Drain and chop the tomatoes.
Dry fry the whole spices (cinnamon, cardamom pods, cloves, dry red chillies) and grind to a fine powder and combine with the pre-ground spices.
Combine the lamb with yoghurt, spices, fenugreek leaf, onion paste and half the ginger/garlic/chilli paste in a large bowl. Cover with cling film and marinade for at least two hours.
Heat the ¼ cup of oil in a deep sides pan. It may seem like a lot of oil, but it really adds to the flavour and you can skim off excess as it is cooking.
Finely slice the remaining half of the onion and fry in the oil until it is golden brown.
Add the remaining half of the ginger/garlic/chilli paste and fry on a low heat for five minutes.
Add the tomatoes and cook for five minutes until they begin to break down.
Add the lamb and all its marinade. Cover the pan and cook for thirty minutes.
After this time it will have created a lot of its own liquid.
Cook for a further thirty minutes on a low heat until the liquid has reduced by half.
At this point, I add ½ pint of water and continue the reducing process. I find this results in really succulent lamb and a rich sauce with a lovely sheen.
Continue cooking until the sauce reduces to little more than a coating.
Serve with rice and rotis.

ROCKSALT:VOYEZ/CES OISEAUX BLANCS/ET CES MAISONS ROUILLÉES

My favourite time of all to visit the seaside is when the promenades are quiet, the skies are grey and rain-flecked and the kiss-me-quick hat shops are shuttered. An English seaside town in the low season has an elegiac quality which appeals so much that I sometimes think I must have some Finnish in my lineage.

Why is it I got the impression that Folkestone is always in an off-season? Maybe it was the seafront – reached using the water-powered Leas Lift - sparsely populated with a few kite flyers, the pebble beach bereft of bathers save for a man looking like he was about to swim the Channel and a few families braving the breeze on a small sandy beach (windbreakers for goalposts).

They’re making an effort here though. The Folkestone Triennial runs until September and there is a little artistic barrio with coffee shops and the like in the centre. As in many of these Kent coastal towns though much of the centre is a bit chavtastic – people worship regularly at the temple of St.Primark – and the good townsfolk have not so much been touched with the ugly stick as beaten firmly around the bonce with it. I fitted in perfectly, of course.

Luckily, they’d picked some of the younger, better-looking and more clued-up examples from the populace to staff chef Mark Sargeant’s first restaurant, Rocksalt and although I had heard about early problems with the service I couldn't quibble: they were terrific and pretty much on the ball during my visit.

Rocksalt itself does look a tad incongruous alongside the small wooden shacks selling whelks and crabsticks and with the newly opened Fish and Chip café Smokehouse a lobster net’s cast away from the mothership this is beginning to look like a sort of proto-Padstein. Sarge-ville if you will.

That said once you’re in the restaurant you could actually be anywhere - probably London. There’s a big floor-to-ceiling window that runs the length of the dining room so you can see the sea and everything but the décor is more along smart/urban lines, corporate even.

I had (wrongly) assumed that Rocksalt was all about fish, especially given its location but there seemed to be plenty of meat dishes on the menu and a board of different steaks was duly paraded around the room for diners to admire. To be honest I would have been more interested in seeing the fish.

Shame, too, that apart from Early Bird they couldn't have used some Kent breweries for their selection of beers, nice though the Meantime ones are. I probably would have stuck to them too as the wine list was a bit snooze-inducing.

Some small snacks to go with my beer were ok but a bit inconsequential. A decent tarama, some radishes which lacked pepperiness came with an anchovy dip, some mealy broad beans with salt. Best of the lot were a bowl of slightly gritty cockles served with a little jug of vinegar which whisked me straight back to seaside holidays of yore when all edibles had to come with a fine layer of sand (some weird by-law I think).

Red Herring was a Smoked Mackerel dyed with Beetroot. Served warm it was good: moist and meaty and not too smoky but a poached or soft-boiled egg may have made it more of a dish; much as I admired the Iberian-like simplicity.

My main course was a special of Dover Sole at £20 (the other was Monkfish) which was simply grilled and simply great, as Dover Sole often is although a bit more inventiveness with the sides wouldn't have gone amiss. I wasn’t looking for an El Bulli experience but serving it with Asparagus and boiled spuds was a sign of a rather unambitious kitchen.

For pudding Kentish Gypsy Tart was very good indeed with a light mousse-like caramel filling and crumbly pastry - even the waitress was surprised at how quickly I demolished it (others less so).

Decent coffee was served with some fudge and some Rocksalt Rock. Which was nice.

So the service was excellent and the food good, so why was I less moved by this place than say Eddie Gilbert’s up the coast in Ramsgate or even The Sportsman on the North Kent Coast?

Well, those places have a sense of location and context which adds to the experience. When you visit them you're certainly not in London whereas at Rocksalt I kept having to look out of the window to remind myself where I was. They also feel like one-offs where Rocksalt feels like a nascent chain.

Then I realised that Rocksalt doesn't just exist for the benefit of whiny Londoners made weary of Burgers, Bahn Mi and Burritos (that’ll be me) but also for local people who want a decent place to eat. As if to emphasise that point as I was leaving I overheard a local couple outside who were looking at the menu.

“Looks good doesn’t it?”

“It does - shall we go in?”

“Why not”.

DINE WITH DOS HERMANOS: A GOODMAN/ O'SHEA/HERDERMAN/WRIGHT BROS JOINT

It all started out as a vague thought in my head as I spent a lazy afternoon in Los Angeles wistfully pondering on all the things I missed most about living in London. There were enough things on the list to fill a sizeable pamphlet including a decent pint and a pork pie. However, very near the top of the pile were the words

“A proper Sunday lunch”

As they do for so many in the UK, a traditional Sunday lunch takes on an almost mythical status when it comes to the favourite dining experiences of Dos Hermanos. When I called London home, few weekends passed without one of DH slamming a large joint of meat in the oven to be accompanied when ready, with heaving plates of vegetables and serenaded by the music of plopping corks.

Lord how I missed a proper Sunday lunch.

My mind also turned to thoughts of “Dine With Dos Hermanos”, our now legendary series of dining events created for no other purpose than to bring large groups of people together to have a damn good time at damn good restaurants. In the five years since they were no more than a twinkle in our eye, they have grown from occasions involving a handful of people to ones that now attract hundreds of requests for tickets.

I knew I was due back in London for a week or so in June and decided, in an all too rare bout of genius, to combine one with the other. However, if we were going to put the DWDH moniker on the Sunday lunch, it could not just be any Sunday lunch, it had to be THE BEST SUNDAY LUNCH EVER.

It was a bold attempt and I knew it would take a special kind of restaurant to make it happen. I shot off an e-mail to the one person I knew would be up to the task, David Strauss of Goodman Steakhouse, without doubt the best GM in the capital. He responded immediately and positively, his only caveat being that if he was going to open the restaurant on a Sunday we would have to promise to fill it.

We were talking about 75+ places here folks and, although the previous events have been a success, this was a huge leap up both in ambition and numbers. But, faint heart never won a fair meal, so I set about using my limited social media skills and the latest DWDH was soon announced on Facebook, Twitter and the blog. I expected a strong response but, nowhere near the deluge of e-mails that began to flood in minutes after the event was announced.

In all we received nearly 750 requests for tickets. Easily the largest response we have ever experienced. There was only one thing for it and that was to write all the names down and pick them from a hat. It seemed the most fair way and I can only apologies to those whose names were not selected.

Between the announcement and the big day, David Strauss and John Cadieux of Goodman went to work talking to their suppliers. If you are going to have the best Sunday lunch, ever, you are going to need the best ingredients and they did not let me or the lucky attendees down.

When I arrived shortly before the event was due to start, the director of Wright Brothers was busy shucking fresh and meaty Maldon Oysters to welcome people as they arrived. Not a bad way to start the meal and even better with an accompanying glass of Prosecco or a strong Bloody Mary.

Next up, as we took our seats, the fantastic staff of Goodman, who had come in on a day when the restaurant is normally closed, began to place large plates of smoked salmon and smoked eel on each of the table. One glimpse at the picture of thick strips of densely coloured salmon will tell you that this is no ordinary fish and indeed as it was described to us by its producer, the incomparable Frank Herderman, the rich, creamy flesh with its light salt cure and subtle smoky flavour was even more appreciated.

Then it was on to the main event and John and his team of willing chefs carried up colossal joints of beef, legs of lamb and shoulders of pork to be received with awe by the crowd before being sliced up into huge chunks to be served family style. I have always loved the beef from O’Shea, but DH have long been telling people just how astonishingly good his piggy flesh is too, Well, those who were with us today will need no further convincing. The lamb too was described to me more than once as a “revelation” and all of the joints had been cooked to perfection in Goodman’s Josper Grills.

As large plates carrying slabs of meat were placed on each table, so too were bowls of creamy cauliflower cheese, roasted carrots, roast potatoes and of course, teetering mounds of glistening Yorkshire puddings. From the noises coming from each table it appeared as if the DH attempt to make this the best Sunday lunch ever might just be accomplished, particularly as the staff made sure that every glass was topped off every time it looked like someone had taken a sip.

After the main course, of course, comes pudding and special praise must go to whoever was in charge of the Sherry trifle making duties. There were no mere trifles, filled as they were with sharp, fresh berries and topped off with cream and toasted almonds. I heard more than one person (including, I believe Hermano Primero) utter the words “I don’t usually like trifle” before plunging the serving spoon deep into the bowls for yet one more helping.

Add this to a final gut busting plate of cheese and a snifter of Marsala wine and all I can say is that if this wasn’t the best Sunday lunch of all times, I bloody hope to be invited to the one that is.

Huge thanks must be shouted out from Dos Hermanos to everyone who made this remarkable event possible.

To David Strauss and John Cadieux for their efforts and good humour in the execution of this Herculean task.

To Dino Joannidies for suggesting I use Eventbrite to collect payment.

To all the team at Goodman, front and back of house, who confirmed why I believe these restaurants offers the best service in London.

To Wright Bros, Frank Herderman and Darragh O’Shea for proving on a daily basis that we have some of the best ingredients on the planet and should shout about them to foreigners whenever possible.

To James Day for most of the decent images in today's post.

And, last of all to everyone who came along to help me fulfill my one simple aim of enjoying “THE BEST SUNDAY LUNCH EVER”. Even if you think we didn’t quite get there, I hope the list below of what 75 of us managed to consume will at least support our claim to have got pretty damn close.

7 Bottles of Vodka
18 Bottles of Prosecco,
24 Bottles of Chardonnay
60 Bottles of Malbec
6 Bottles of Marsala
400 Maldon Oysters
30Kgs Smoked Salmon & Eel
90kgs Pork/Lamb & Beef
20kg Sherry Trifle
10kg of British Cheese

Roll on the next Dine With Dos Hermanos