February 2021: Sweet and Sour Pork; Wild Mushroom and Hollandaise Pizza; Choc and Ginger Nut Slice

◘ THE STARTER ◘

The book: Chinese Food Made Easy (Ching-He Huang)

The recipe: p24, "Sweet and Sour Pork"

Our opener for this month's Random Menu may sound like a main course, but let's talk quantities for a moment. "Serves 2", the recipe says, before describing a dish involving two pork loin steaks, a bit of sauce, and "salad leaves or steamed jasmine rice" to accompany. I'm sorry, but a thin cut of pork each and some salad leaves is a starter, not a main. At the very least, it's intended as part of a selection of dishes, and so I'm happy to interpret it as a first course for the purposes of February's Random Menu.

(That said, I double the quantities anyway. I'm permanently hungry these days, and the pork steaks come in a pack of four and I'm not going to use them for anything else. Any excuse really.)

The recipe and the photo on the opposite page make it clear that this is not "sweet and sour" in the conventional British sense, i.e. horrible gloopy red sauce out of a jar. It's still not especially photogenic, though, so you won't be getting many snaps of this one. Not that that usually stops me, I know.

Anyway, I start by whizzing some dry-roasted peanuts (a recipe-given alternative to roasted soya beans that I'm happy to grab with both hands), dried chillies, sea salt and white pepper in the food processor "until coarsely ground".

Probably went a smidge beyond coarse, but oh well

The pork steaks are pressed down into this mixture until thoroughly covered, then wok-fried on both sides until nicely browned.

Nice: check. Brown: check.

In the meantime, I've also used the food processor to zoom together some pineapple chunks, pineapple juice and lime juice. This is meant to result in a "paste", but it's definitely still more of a liquid. I'm going to thicken it down in the next stage, though, so no biggie.

I'm instructed to pour this sauce into the wok that I've just done the steaks in, reduce it down for a few minutes, then add light soy sauce, a dash of rice wine and/or ground white pepper "if required". I'm not sure how I'm supposed to judge what's required or not, so I add them all, because they're all flavours that I like.

At this point I'd like to stress that the recipe does not ask me to wipe the wok first, and so I assume the sauce is supposed to pick up all of the good oils and fats and slightly burny bits that have been left behind from the frying process. I soon realise this probably isn't the case, however, because the sauce in the photo accompanying the recipe is pineapple-yellow and mine is... not.

It wouldn't be The Random Kitchen without a photo of some brown gunk in a bowl

But here's the thing: poured inelegantly over the pork steaks to serve (you really don't need to see what that looks like), the end result is actually very flavourful. It's deep, it's spicy, it's nutty, there's a bit of pineapple sweetness poking through - all rather satisfying. To be honest, it tastes more like a modified satay sauce than anything else, and with the peanuts dominating the flavour of the pork coating, I think that would be the case even if I'd begun the sauce stage with a clean wok.

"This is my simple and healthy version of sweet and sour pork and will be unlike anything you have tasted in a Chinese restaurant," the blurb begins. Well, that's not inaccurate, since this is almost entirely unlike sweet and sour pork. But it is really nice and I can see myself making it again as part of a main meal, so that's not a bad start.

One-word verdict: Accidentalicious.

◘ THE MAIN COURSE ◘

The book: Good Housekeeping New Step-By-Step Cookbook

The recipe: p340, "Wild Mushroom and Hollandaise Pizza"

In the same way as every bloke who thinks he's shit-hot in the kitchen has a chilli recipe with some kind of "special ingredient" that he's only too keen to bend your ear about at a friend's BBQ, there is a whole culture around home pizza-making whose appeal eludes me somewhat, I must admit. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's great satisfaction to be had in finding and perfecting the use of just the right pizza stone or even an entire pizza oven, but given the cost and effort that involves and the time it takes to get a pizza dough going in the first place, I'm always going to scratch the pizza itch by just giving Mamma Dough a call instead (yeah).

Still, even in my pizza-hipster-cynical state, I wouldn't particularly expect a Good Housekeeping cookbook to be the home of an authentically Italian creation, so I'm curious as to how this one will turn out - especially as it involves a slightly improbable topping too.

I have the ingredients for the topping laid out on the work surface thusly:

...when Sam walks into the room, eyes up the cubes on the plate and says "ooh, cheese!". "No," I say, "that's butter for the hollandaise sauce." "Where's the cheese?", he asks. "There is none," I say.

"," he replies.

It's true - this is a pizza with no tomato or white sauce base and no cheese on top. I figure you wouldn't bother putting this in a cookbook if it was as pointless as that makes it sound, though. Well, you'd hope, at least.

Either way, it begins with making a simple pizza dough. Flour, salt, yeast, olive oil and warm water are slowly persuaded to take shape, and while we don't own an oven with a proving drawer (owning a house first feels like more of a priority), we do have a heated clothes airer that means there's a nice warm corner of the kitchen I can use for the purpose. Between that and having the patience to knead it properly, my dough actually rises for once - and then some. Hurrah!

In the 45 minutes it's taken for that to happen, I've made the topping. "Wild mushrooms" were always going to be a bit of a stretch given we're still getting supermarket deliveries and restricting ourselves to minimal extra shops (bring on normality, eh?); the recipe talks about "chanterelles, trompettes-des-morts, oyster mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms" et al, but I have to make do with a couple of packs of shiitake and a handful of chestnuts to make up the numbers. Not exactly exotic, but it all ends up largely the same once it's been sliced and briefly sautéed in butter and garlic like it is here.

Hollandaise isn't something I've made before, and I didn't really know what went into it. Turns out it's basically just an egg yolk, that aforementioned pile of butter cubes, and some lemon zest and juice. This is slowly cooked and combined in a glass bowl over some simmering water and is supposed to have "the consistency of mayonnaise" by the time I'm done. It's somewhat thinner than that even after I add the chopped coriander required by this recipe - surely not canon? - but I figure it might thicken as it sits. (It does, a bit.)

Attractive

So, here's what I find a bit odd about this recipe. Once the dough is risen, I'm asked to roll it into a 25cm circle - as you'll see, we'll have to settle for "imperfect" on the shaping front - and then crimp up the edges.

The base is then baked "as is" for "about 20 minutes, or until golden brown and cooked". So, no topping added yet. Okay.

I check it after 13 minutes and it's already looking pretty golden (and feeling pretty rock solid).

Since it's going back in the oven again once the topping is added, I take the executive decision to skip to that stage right now, lest the crust need the hammer and chisel treatment at the end of it all.

This involves folding the mushrooms into the hollandaise, and then... pouring it on top. I guess that's why I had to crimp up the edges of the pizza base - it'd go everywhere if I hadn't.

Further baking follows, and even with the three-dimensional crust edge to prevent disasters, things get somewhat buttery. It's not quite swimming in the stuff by the time it's done, but there is definite greasy seepage.

Still, it looks more or less like a pizza, so that's something! Oh, this "serves 4", by the way. [pause for raucous laughter]

As expected, the base is pretty tough. I realise the blind baking phase is intended to stop the greasy sauce from making everything soggy, but a bit of sog (that's a word now) actually mightn't have hurt. The topping is quite nice; that's about as far as I'll go, but you can't stray too far with garlic and mushrooms and lemon and the like. There's obviously nothing remotely Italian about it but it's a pleasant enough eat, just nothing to write home about. (Enough to write a blog about though, amirite? #content #iscooking #hashtag)

The biggest issue, though, remains with the butter content of the hollandaise. Because it's leaked into the pizza base...

...and beyond...

...the crust is extremely oily. It actually reminds me of eating fried bread, of all things. And as welcome as that may be as an occasionally indulgent add to a breakfast plate, it's not really what I want from a pizza.

So, yeah. Not a failure, but not a massive success either. I think I could do a better job on this by approaching it differently next time: no blind baking, less butter in the sauce, and maybe some cheese on top to glue it all together. Though I suppose if I added any more caveats, I'd be making an entirely different recipe...

One-word verdict: Disjointed.

◘ THE DESSERT ◘

The book: 101 Cheap Eats (BBC Good Food)

The recipe: p208, "Choc and Ginger Nut Slice"

After all that faff, a mercifully simple sweet treat to finish - essentially the kind of no-cook traybake they might teach you how to make on Blue Peter. Although I still manage to fuck it up.

As is so often the case, I begin by melting butter, plain chocolate and syrup in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. 

You know what that looks like, but here's a photo anyway!

 
Meanwhile, I take a packet of ginger biscuits and bash them into crumbs.

This flimsy bag does not survive the rolling pin assault...

...but the result is fine. Imperfect, but that doesn't matter.

The biscuit crumbs and some toasted and chopped hazelnuts are stirred through the melty chocolate mixture, then the whole thing is pressed into a sandwich tin.

Next, I melt the remaining chocolate.

Hang on.

There was meant to be remaining chocolate?

Honestly, Martin, read the fucking recipe. I was supposed to have used just 100g of the 185g of chocolate in the first stage. Instead, the body of my traybake is almost twice as chocolatey as it's meant to be, and I have to quickly melt a little bit more chocolate to basically serve as glue for the remaining hazlenuts.

Still, as long as it sets, "too much chocolate" is always better than "not enough chocolate", and so into the fridge it goes.

And indeed - after chilling it for 3-4 hours instead of the suggested 1 hour, just in case - the end result looks fairly acceptable!

The idea is to cut it into slices at this stage and serve it to 8 people, but since the events of the past year have rendered laughable the very idea of seeing 8 people, we just keep it in the fridge and work our way through it over the next few days.

It's undoubtedly rich - my fault, obvs - but the kick of some decent-quality ginger biscuits (I bought branded for once, admittedly only because I couldn't get own-brand in this week's online shop) swiftly cuts through the chocolate overload and the hazelnuts give it a bit of texture too.

Now, don't get me wrong: this is ridiculously simple and I can't claim it's any kind of radical departure from the kind of thing you all know how to make already. But after a "sweet and sour" recipe that was neither and a brutally inauthentic pizza, isn't it nice to end on something that does exactly what it says on/in the tin?

One-word verdict: Pleasing.