Mushroom And Swiss

Burger joint Hardees has a sandwich called Mushroom n Swiss, a beef patty covered in a dark mushroom mixture and topped with a slice of something that may once have been based on emmental. Sarah has always had a fatal weakness for this particularly fine example of fast food at its most terrifying. The trouble is, of course, that it’s delicious. It’s only shortly afterwards that you realise the aftertaste isn’t a fine countryside organic wholefood experience but a powerful charge of salt, sugar and awful chemical compounds designed to smack your tastebuds so hard around the head they don’t even realise they’re eating mass produced processed gunk that, without the chemicals, would be a tasteless pile of goo leached of any goodness or flavour.

There’s a vile little recipe circulating on the interwebs that uses tinned mushrooms and Campbell’s mushroom soup to recreate the Mushroom n Swiss experience. I find it odd how many American recipes start with ingredient lists of packets of this and cans of that. It’s almost as if raw food doesn’t exist.

Anyway, here’s a go at doing a homemade mushroom n swiss that doesn’t use canned shite. Although it does use other things that my old mum wouldn’t allow in the house. It’s a guilty pleasure, this one...

Ingredients

• 250g fresh button mushrooms, sliced
• 1 tbsp mushroom soy sauce
• 2 tsp brown sugar
• 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 100ml wine or stock
• Oil
• 500g minced beef
• Processed Emmental slices
• Golden Loaf Bakery burger baps (the sesame ones)

Splash a frying pan with the oil and fry off the mushrooms on a high heat so they brown and then start to relax and become moist. Slosh in the soy sauce and mix it all up, followed by the other ingredients. Keep it all moving in the pan and cook until it’s a mixture of soft mushroom in a thick, dark, sauce. Cover and keep in a warm place.

Split the beef into four balls of equal size and weight, then squash these into round discs – they should be 1-2 cm bigger all round than the buns and quite thin, you don’t want great thick patties that form a wodge inside the bun, you want a bun-matching beef patty experience - and the pattys shrink when you cook 'em (you might think that's too obvious to mention, but many burger-serving restaurants that aren't massive chains get it wrong time after time). You can either pan-fry the patties with a quick brush of oil (use a grillpan) or, better, grill ‘em off. Either way, you don’t want to cremate ‘em, just seal them and let them cook through a little - there should be a tinge of pink in an ideal world. This is not true to the original, of course, which is a uniform grey. They’ll keep, covered, in a warm oven for a short while. Let’s face it, the chains will keep ‘em like that for hours...

Slice the buns in half and toast the cut faces, ideally under a grill. Slap a beef patty on a bun, slather with mushroom mixture and then top with a square of shiny, suspiciously un-emmental looking stuff from a packet. If you’re feeling wicked, slip one of these slices of wrongness under the patty as well.

Serve with chips, French fries or whatever you fancy. And tomato sauce. And mayonnaise. Even mix some Dijon with the mayo.  But don’t blame us – you chose to follow this recipe and the post burger guilt thing is entirely yours to deal with.

Putting on the Ritz

Emirates
EK 903/902 to/from Amman from Dubai
Web: http://www.emirates.com

We've reviewed Emirates' food before. It's perhaps unusual to include a review of airline fare on a food blog, but when you're sitting 'up front' you have a certain expectation and our last review, some while ago, found EK's food to be worthy of note on a restaurant quality test scale. It's linked here, BTW.


So a recent trip gives a chance to compare then with now. And oh dear, but there's trouble in paradise.

Emirates' Business class service is nothing less than excellent. The staff are friendly, the purser's got a tablet PC with guest preferences noted and everything's handled with a personal touch, with ease and smilingly at that. A glass of something before we take off? Oh yes. A glass of something with a dish of nuts as we break the cloud layer? Sure - but cut out the macadamias, eh? Many of those turning left rather than right (Zuckerburgs excepted) are old enough to not necessarily want the saturated fat punch those things pack.

Outbound
The menu's straightforward and sensible: mezze or a lobster and crab timbale; Gulf style biryani, tenderloin, prawns in tamarind or rigatoni - dessert's a yoghurt panna cotta. That's really taken care of Arab, European and Indian tastes and gives everyone a nice mix and match. I took the timbale and the tenderloin because I was feeling, well, straightforward.

The timbale was good - a little heap of shredded lobster and crab meat moistened with a touch of Mary Rose, a few clear, sweet cubes of pineapple jelly dotting the dish. Served with a lovely Craggy Range sauvignon blanc, it's a really nice starter.

Seared tenderloin beef fillet steak, as it's described on the menu, had me a little confused, it's like serving a seared breast of chicken breast. Served with 'a wild mushroom sauce, accompanied with roasted new potato skin on with herbs and sautéed free cut vegetables in a chunky tomato sauce' it was an overcooked little dish of strong and clashing flavours. Who would be mad enough to roast new potatoes for a start? What a terrible thing to do to them, sweet and clean as they are. And the steak was 'grise', the sauce burned on and the vegetables overdone to soft squishiness. It was simply a dish of over-baked stuff and really didn't live up to the description. It came with a lovely soft Torbeck, though.

The pannacotta was nice enough.

Inbound
Once again, excellent service. I am a huge EK fan - have been for years - and this is just what it's all about. Relaxed and stuck in a book, somehow I miss the menu being handed out but that's just dealt with nicely. The choice this time is mezze or smoked salmon; lamb loin meloubeh, stuffed chicken breast, pan-drived pomfret or seafood pasta. Dessert in all cases is banoffee pie.

The salmon is served with triangles of feta and a green bean and 'sun-dried tomato salad along with celery heart and seasonal green leaves' - it turns out that 'seasonal green leaves' means some frisee but that's okay. The celery leaves are hardly a heart but I like celery. The salmon runs red when you squeeze lemon on it, which isn't a great sign - it's served as three thick tranches and they're moist enough, although hardly small smokehouse fare - this is farmed rather than artisanale, if I'm not mistaken. It's actually hard, up there, to taste the difference - but it doesn't scream smoked and salmon, as good stuff will. The salad's nice, though. The Meursault was lovely, but a bit warm.

I took the pomfret as a main. The hostie didn't recognise 'pomfret' as a fish and we settled on 'the fish course'. Served with a 'clear ginger sauce and spring baton, accompanied by stir-fried noodles and wok-fried seasonal vegetables', I should have thought my choice through and avoided. this.

How can you sensibly expect 'stir-fried noodles' to survive being dished up, cooled down, re-heated and served without becoming a mass of slightly soft stuff? Wok-fried seasonal vegetables should come from a wok - it's simply unreasonable to expect them to survive being stacked in containers and kept for hours before being lammed into a tray heater and banged out five miles above the earth. This was borne out by the dish of over-cooked fish, limp vegetable, over-salted gloopy sauce and soft, flaccid noodles. I'm not sure if EK is at fault trying to make this work or if I was at fault ordering it. Either way, I couldn't finish the dish.

The banoffee pie 'garnished with white chocolate shavings' was actually garnished with milk chocolate shavings and was heavy on the foamy cream stuff and light on the 'offee'. I'm not sure that banoffee pie needs to compete with a strawberry compote, actually. How about a créme Anglaise?

Both menus promise a cheese selection that simply didn't happen. It wasn't the end of my world, to tell you the truth.

So is reviewing business class airline food the work of a total twat? Probably, but you're paying the money and the food's a major differentiator - along with the legroom, fancy screen, funky electro-seat and the service - and you're paying double the cattle class rack rate for it. The experience is one of being diverted from the tiresome process of frequent flying by being well looked after and fed with a menu of things that delight. So it's worth bringing it under scrutiny, IMHO.

The trip, the service and the many creature comforts delivered. Sadly the mains didn't.

Poached eggs with yoghurt.

This is from The "Moro" cookbook.

A really quick and unusual dish from Turkey.

You will need:

About 12 fresh sage leaves.

1 garlic clove, crushed tp a paste with salt.

350 g home-made or greek yoghurt, thinned with 2 tablespoons milk.

75g butter

Large splash of any vinegar

4 very fresh eggs

1 teaspoon fresh Turkish chile flakes (Italian will do)

Salt & freshly ground pepper.

Caramelise the butter, heating slowly until the whey separates and turns golden brown, being careful not to burn the brown bits. Strain through a fine sieve and fry the sage leaves in the clear liquid until crisp, Lift them out, drain on kitchen paper and return the browned bits to the butter.. Set aside. Poach the eggs in the vinegar and water. While the eggs are poaching, mix the garlic paste with the yogurt. Check for seasoning. Spread 1/4 of the yoghurt on each of 4 plates plate, making a well in the middle for the egg. When the eggs are cooked the way you want them, lift them out, drain and place in the well., season with salt and pepper. Warm up the butter and and divide evenly over the yoghurt and eggs. Divide the sage leaves and chili flakes over the top.

Magical.

Serves 4

Puddings Aplenty!

If you followed the Christmas Pudding Recipe, you'll have a big bowl of rich Christmassy stuff in the fridge. Now you're going to boil it. For six hours.



You obviously need to plan this so you'll be around for six hours. You'll need some tinfoil, some butter muslin, some greaseproof paper, a little butter and a 2 litre Pyrex bowl. Oh, and some kitchen string. Cut two rounds of greaseproof paper using the bowl's rim as a guide.

Butter the bowl well and slosh the pudding mix into it. Top this with the disks of greaseproof and then fold a double layer of muslin over the top. Tie this under the rim of the bowl with some kitchen string, making sure it's good and tight. If you're feeling clever, tie the last loop of string over the bowl to act as a handle - as long as the string's good and tight (and so won't slip over the lip and send the bowl tumbling), you'll have a handy burnt-finger saving handle.

Fold a couple of feet of tinfoil up to make a square pad and place this on the base of a largeish pan, adding the pudding. Ideally you should use a pan that leaves space around the pudding bowl because you're going to need to pour boiling water into the pan without soaking the pudding. The foil pad acts in place of an upturned plate in keeping the pudding clear of the hotter base of the pan. Boil up a kettle of water and pour this into the pan, turning on the heat and topping the pan up to a couple of centimetres short of the rim of the bowl. And set it to a gentle boil. Cover and find something better to do with your time, returning every 30 minutes or so to check and top up the water. Six hours later, stop doing this and let the pudding cool.



When the pudding's good and cold (probably the next day), remove the muslin and greaseproof and give the pudding a good poke with a sharp stick all over. Pour brandy over the top so that it soaks into the holes, then cover the pudding with another couple of disks of greaseproof and some more muslin. At this stage, I usually tie the muslin down with masking tape as its easier to remove it for topping up sessions.

Every week or so leading up to Christmas, pull the pudding out of the deep recess in your fridge and give it a slosh of brandy. Re-tie the coverings and pop it back again.



On the day, you need to allow two hours for the pudding to cook. Do the whole tinfoil pad/pan thing again and boil it up as before. Upend it on a warm serving dish and slip some nice warm brandy over the top. Ignite and serve with the lights out.