I did a post a few days ago on how to make a caramel sauce the right way. Now it's time for its lazy cousin, the butterscotch sauce. The ingredients for a butterscotch sauce are the same as that for a caramel sauce (sugar, cream, butter), but the technique and quantities differ. Instead of starting by making a caramel, as [...]
Quite simply the ultimate red wine sauce for steak, that’s Bordelaise folks. Hailing from the Bordeaux region of France, Bordelaise sauce is one of those classical sauces every keen cook should have in their repertoire. Now you may serve Bordelaise on a great manly hunk of steak, but for me this sauce is essentially feminine. The Parisian woman of sauces [...]
I have at least five different kinds of mustard in my fridge at any given time. Good old hot English, wholegrain (great for salad dressings), Dijon (great for anything) and some gourmet ones with exotic ingredients like black truffle and Chablis. Sophisticated stuff. And then I have the other kind. The one of my childhood, the one that grandma made [...]
About the most sinful thing you can do with fat and eggs… Yup folks, that would be those three charming French culinary cousins mayonnaise, béarnaise and hollandaise. Mayonnaise is the odd one out in this party as the fat content is provided by oil, whereas béarnaise and hollandaise use, you guessed it, butter. I’ve seen many a competent cook blanch [...]
Chakalaka – it’s as fun to say as it is to eat. Now if you’re a halfway self-respecting South African, you’ll know what this is. But for the benefit of my readers in farflung places, it can best be described as an African relish, eaten most especially with ‘pap’ (kinda like polenta) and meat at a ‘braai’ (barbeque). Chakalaka recipes [...]
I have a policy and it’s a good one – when a bottle of anything comes knocking on my door, I let it in. And so it was last week when the folks from La Motte wine estate sent over two gorgeous ribbon-festooned bottles of their specialist jams from the La Motte farm shop for me to try. Strawberry, lemongrass [...]