Garden Tool Set: chillies

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Monday, August 10, 2015

Grow Your Own Curry

MsMarmiteLover's aubergine curry

Think of curries, whether an Indian dhansak or jalfrezi, or a hot and sour Thai jungle curry, or a Malaysian laksa rich with aromatic flavours, and we think of exotic ingredients. A curry made with all-purpose curry powder will never taste as good as a bespoke curry in an authentic Indian restaurant. Ready-made pastes for specific dishes – like a Mussaman, or a Tikka Masala – are convenient but to me at any rate they all taste rather too alike to be seriously credible.

Before I grew my own curry ingredients, I knew that on the occasions when I’d planned ahead and bought fresh ingredients to make my own curry powders and pastes that the resulting dishes were streets ahead. But there are ingredients that are very difficult to get hold of, even here in London where we’re lucky enough to have food shops of the world on our doorsteps. So you leave out the curry leaves, or the kaffir lime leaves, or the holy basil and the curry still tastes great, but is missing something.

Ingredients like lemon grass, ginger, turmeric, cumin, etc, are invariably imported and so by the time they reach even a high turnover oriental supermarket they will have lost a significant amount of freshness. But what many people don’t know is that it’s perfectly possible to grow many of these supposedly exotic ingredients here in the UK, here on your patio.

Make a curry from ingredients you have grown yourself, that can come straight out of the ground into your pestle and mortar and the flavours will sing out loud. No longer will the curry be simply hot with a vaguely warm spicy taste, it will be aromatic and you’ll taste all the sweet-sour, hot, salty, mustardy, clovey, aniseedy flavours as they should be.

There’s a convenience factor as well. I have cobbled together a Thai green curry paste from scratch, added coconut cream from the store cupboard, some rice plus whatever was lurking at the bottom of the fridge and made a fantastic fresh curry in less than half an hour, no shopping needed. It takes a bit longer than using a packaged paste, but it’s much nicer and much more satisfying.

Let’s start though with some core ingredients of any spice paste. Onions and garlic form the basis of many curry and curry pastes and these are two ingredients that grow very happily here in the garden.

Onions
Onion sets can be planted out either in autumn or spring. The advantage of planting onions in autumn is that they will get a head start in spring next year as soon as the weather warms up and you should be lifting your onions to eat in May. There should be just enough time to plant overwintering onions now, but don't leave it any later. We planted Senshyu onions in the Secret Garden, a type specifically bred for autumn planting, spacing the onions evenly and planting them just deep enough to leave the tips slightly exposed above the soil - not too much top showing or else they will be dug up again by birds who appear to enjoy tossing freshly planted onions around the garden.

In the summer we ran a workshop on companion planting – the beneficial effects of positioning certain plants close to each other. Onions and garlic are well-known companion plants – the onion smell and garlic smell are said to deter some insect pests. Onions are good for repelling carrot fly - the onion odour masks the smell of carrots - while garlic is good to plant under roses as the smell deters greenfly.

Garlic

Now is the optimum time to plant garlic. We would always recommend a UK-bred variety such as Solent Wight for best results here. Check the weather forecast and aim to plant just before a cold snap: garlic cloves like to be chilled after planting to stimulate growth. Separate the garlic bulb into individual cloves and push each one into the ground, closing the soil over the tip so they are covered.

Fennel

Another spice ingredient suitable for growing outdoors is fennel. Fennel seeds are an integral part of a number of spice mixes and this herb fennel (this isn’t the type that grows a swollen bulb at the base) produces edible leaves, edible flowerheads and then of course, after flowering, the seeds. These seeds are mature right now - try biting into a fresh fennel seed and see how pungent the flavour is.

There’s one other thing I like about growing hot chillies, ginger, turmeric and so on. There’s something a bit subversive about it. You’re not supposed to be able to grow these plants here in Britain, which makes it all the more fun to try and all the more fun when you get a half-decent crop.

Chillies

Chillies are a great example of a plant that is ridiculously easy to grow. I’ve been raising chilli plants for 10 years now, and I can’t remember the last time I bought a chilli pepper in the shops. There’s something incredibly satisfying – almost addictive - about growing chillies.

Not only are they easy to grow, but they mature into extremely attractive plants laden with fruit. In the Secret Garden we've grown Jalapenos, which are piquant and which are also traditionally smoked to make the Mexican chipotle sauce, and also the miniature Basket Of Fire variety, which we picked and used in the curries served at the Grow Your Own Curry afternoon. Basket of Fire is a very hot, birds-eye style chilli – ideal for Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese dishes.

Ginger

Ginger is a tropical plant, but it’s perfectly possible to grow ginger in a pot, indoors, in a conservatory or on a sunny windowsill. First you will need to find a piece of ginger root with small yellow nodules (see picture) protruding from it - these will develop into shoots. You may have to hunt around in your local mini-market and greengrocers to find suitable roots for planting.

Plant up in rich moist compost and keep the soil moist, but not wet. Keep temperature as constant as possible: bright windowsill against a double-glazed window is good, heated conservatory is good. They prefer not to be in direct sunlight. Anything above 20 degrees is workable, above 25 degrees better. The root will take up to a month to sprout but will then grow quickly throughout the summer before dying back at the beginning of autumn - anytime from October is a good time to harvest. Do not expect to become self-sufficient in ginger unless you have a lot of pots.

There's a step-by-step guide to how we grew our ginger plants here.

Turmeric
Growing turmeric in the UK is very similar to ginger: you need to plant a piece of rhizome with a nodule on it that looks as though it might sprout. However, turmeric will withstand slightly lower temperatures than ginger – down to around 18 degrees Celsius is OK, and also its leaves are edible and can be used for flavouring.

However, don’t imagine that you can just snap off a leaf and start chewing on it. The leaves tend to be used either in the same way as banana leaves, for wrapping food in, or ground up into a paste, or pickled. Or the leaves are picked and soaked to get some of the sourness out of them – then the soaking water is used in the recipe and the leaves thrown away.

The picture here shows part of the fresh root which can be cut from the plant and used fresh, or dried and then ground into powder.

Curry Leaves

Pictured left is a Murraya koenigii, or curry leaf tree and it’s one of those times when Latin or botanical names comes in handy because this is a very different plant to the curry plant which you find on sale in garden centres all over the country.

Murraya koenigii is the plant whose leaves are used throughout Indian and Malaysian cooking, usually quickly fried in oil and then added to a curry as a finish or garnish.

I find fresh curry leaves practically impossible to find over here, and dried ones seem to me to have lost much of their flavour. They do freeze well, but again, I don’t have much luck finding even the frozen versions.

So instead I have my little curry tree. And it is very little –this is a young plant and in its natural habitat it will grow into a full-sized tree, over 10ft tall.

I bought this plant from Plants4Presents and they’re also sold in the UK by Poyntzfield Nursery up in Scotland. The two things to remember about keeping a curry leaf tree happy is that 1) they’re not frost hardy so you will need to grow them in a pot, outdoors in summer, indoors in winter; 2) in their natural habitat they grow on the forest floor, so don’t put them out in the sun. Put them under a tree.

Lemon grass

Lemon grass is well worth growing in the UK – even outside. Once established, the plants will grow vigorously, giving you fragrant leaves for flavouring, for making herbal teas, or scenting your bath. It will also grow offshoots, which the close-up photo here shows clearly at the base of the plant, which you can use as the classic lemon grass stalk in Thai curry pastes.

There are three ways you can get a lemon grass plant going. You can buy seeds fairly readily from garden centres and nurseries. Sow these in a seed tray in February and keep warm – cover with clear plastic lid or polythene bag until the seeds have germinated. When the seedlings are big enough they can go into a big pot, a number of smaller pots, or, once the danger of frost is over, outside in a sunny sheltered spot in lots of good rich compost.

The second way is to find some very fresh-looking stalks either in the supermarket or more likely an Asian supermarket. Trim the stalks lightly then sit them in water – stuffed into the neck of a cleaned-out Coke bottle or a plastic water bottle that supports the stalks is a good idea. Change the water daily and you should see white roots begin to appear. The time taken for the stalks to develop roots varies enormously: it can be a few days, or it can be several weeks.

Thirdly, you can divide your own established plants once they’ve developed side-shoots. Instead of using all the side-shoots for cooking, select some for removing from the mother-plant and planting up separately.

By September you will need to harvest your lemon grass – any that isn’t used at the time can be sliced and put in the freezer, where they will keep very well.

Otherwise, bring your pots of lemon grass in over winter. They will not survive temperatures of less than 5 degrees. Give them a haircut, trimming them down to about six inches, then continue to water them sparingly, just enough to prevent them from drying out, and they should come back to life in the spring.

One other point to be aware of, if you have cats, is that the cats love lemon grass. Mine regularly likes to sit on the kitchen table and chew away at the leaves. Not great if you’re planning to harvest them later.

Kaffir Lime

The kaffir lime is a member of the citrus family which produces highly fragrant leaves used in Thai cooking, and also knobbly-shaped limes with, again, highly fragrant zest. I’ve had a Kaffir lime bush for five or six years now and while it isn't very prolific in terms of producing fruit, it earns its keep by giving me a hassle-free supply of Kaffir lime leaves 365 days of the year. I find fresh leaves practically impossible to find in the shops, and the dried versions have lost much of their flavour.

Citrus trees have quite a precise set of requirements to keep them healthy. If you’re able, either by luck or design, to provide a suitable environment for a citrus tree then it will appear to need very little maintenance. If your conditions aren’t ideal then they’ll prove troublesome.

In summer, in the UK, they’ll like to be outdoors, somewhere sunny and sheltered. A south-facing patio is ideal. They don’t however like frost or wet winters so you will need to bring your tree indoors in winter. They do, however, like to be kept cool in winter, somewhere between 7 and 13 degrees. I move mine to an unheated loft bathroom under the skylight – it’s not too cold because of all the heat coming up from the floors below and it’s nice and bright with the big skylight window. If you have a light, bright conservatory that’s ideal so long as you don’t turn the heating up in winter.

In summer, keep the soil moist; in winter keep it dry and water very sparingly. However, it may well be worth standing the citrus pot in a tray of gravel which you keep wet, to raise the overall humidity around the plant – they do tend to find the air in our centrally heated houses very dry. (Another reason why the unheated bathroom works well.)

We’re doing a citrus workshop next month with lemons, limes, oranges, and kumquats when we’ll go into specific detail. However, I usually say that if your citrus looks happy: plant looking perky, leaves nice and glossy, then it is happy. A characteristic of any citrus plant that is struggling, whether too wet, too dry, too hot or too cold, is that all its leaves will fall off. A bald plant is one that is in trouble.

Coriander

Coriander can be grown both for its leaves - and roots and stems, which are often used in Thai dishes - and also for its seeds, which are commonly used in spice mixes and powders.

When growing for its leaves, I find I get the best results by sowing the seeds thickly in a seed tray, keeping the tray warm and harvesting as microleaves - snipping off the leaves when the seedlinsg are just a couple of inches high.

Growing for seed is almost easier as coriander is a notorious 'bolter' - the plants often to seed. Simply collect the seeds as soon as they turn brown on the plant and let them finish drying on a plate in the kitchen before storing in an airtight jar.

You may often see what looks like coriander referred to as cilantro. I used to think it was simply that cilantro was the American word, but since I’ve started growing it as well as eating it I keep coming across cilantro in a British context. I have seen it suggested that coriander is grown for seed and cilantro for leaf but also that coriander refers to the whole plant: roots, stem (which are also edible and much used in Thai cooking) and all, while cilantro is the leaf only.

Thai basil

Until about six weeks ago I would have been recommending these wholeheartedly as the kind of herb which is not only easy to grow but also impossible to buy in the shops. Then my local Waitrose started stocking it in the fresh cut herbs sections. Thai basil is the variety that gives Thai curries that sweet licorice scent, and ordinary basil leaves just don’t work the same way. It’s incredibly easy to grow Thai basil in a pot on a sunny windowsill and one medium-sized pot will keep you in basil all summer long.

I grow lots of different types of basil, all in the same way. Get a medium pot with drainage holes and fill it full of good compost – multipurpose will do but it needs to be fine rather than rough-cut. Water it well. Sprinkle the seed over the surface – be generous, but keep the seed in a single layer. Cover very lightly with a layer of fine compost, so that the seed are just covered. If you’re sowing before April, cover the pot either with a fitted cloche, or a clear polythene bag stretched over the lip of the pot. April or after, you can leave the pot uncovered.

Put the pot in your sunniest windowsill: basil likes lots of light. The seeds should germinate by the end of a week – just three or four days at the height of summer – and once they’re through you can remove the polythene covering.

Keep them growing on the windowsill and start cutting when the leaves are big enough. Try to snip leaves from all over the pot: if you completely denude one seedling down to a bare stalk it won’t grow any more leaves. But if you pinch out the leaves at the very tip of the plant it will regrow quite happily. Water regularly to keep the compost moist and your pot should last all summer. Thai basil will start producing purple flower buds which can be snipped out and used as well as a garnish and flavouring.

After much experimentation I have come to the conclusion that here in the Uk, basil is an indoor plant. Outdoors, they fall prey too easily to aphids (greenfly), they get watered too irregularly and blown about in the wind. A warm sunny windowsill with still air and not so much temperature fluctuation will give you much more succulent leaves.

Holy basil

Often confused with Thai basil, this has smaller, more rounded leaves which are a matt green (or flushed with red, if it’s holy red basil) and slightly hairy. It looks frankly a more nondescript plant than the striking Thai basil. The flavour of the leaves is spicier, hotter, less sweet. Holy basil is also associated with Thai cooking, in stir fries, stews and rice dishes.

You can grow holy basil in exactly the same way as any other basil, but I’ve found it less prolific than the other basils and slower to grow.

Fenugreek
Like coriander you can grow fenugreek, or methi, for the leaves or seeds, both of which will give your dishes a distinctive mustard flavour and aroma. You can grow fenugreek from the seeds you buy in the supermarket. You can grow as separate plants or, a better solution at this time of year, is to grow as microleaves (pictured, left). Soak the seeds for about eight hours or overnight in clean cold water, then spread them evenly over a seed tray filled with compost. Cover the seeds very lightly with compost, and place a clear lid or polythene bag over the seed tray. Place somewhere light, bright and warm and the seeds should germinate in just two to three days.

There are two distinct types of fenugreek. The more common large-seeded variety has white flowers, and can only be cut once so once you've harvested, you'll need to sow some more. The smaller seeded variety has slightly smaller leaves, yellow flowers and will regrow after cutting.

If you're growing to raise single plants to maturity, soak the seeds first as above, then sow directly in a well-drained sunny spot. Sow the seeds thinly and just cover with soil, any time between April and August. Fenugreek will survive a light frost so is worth sowing sowing successionally throughout the growing season.

Cumin

There’s no reason why you can’t grow your own cumin plant in a sunny sheltered spot in the garden or in a patio container, or on a windowsill if you have the space. It’s an umbellifer, so related to caraway, fennel, and also carrots and parsnips. However, most of the world’s cumin is grown in the Middle East – it prefers daytime temperature consistently in the mid-20s Celsius.

If you’re going to try them outside, sow the seed indoors and keep warm until the seeds germinate. Once the seedlings are large enough to handle, transplant to pots, about three to four seedlings per pot. These can be then be kept indoors to grow on, moved outdoors once all danger of frost is past (say, late April), or the plants can be transferred to an outside border. Then pray for a long hot summer.

Simpler is to sow the cumin seeds directly in the large pot you plan to raise them in. Sow indoors as above, thin the seedlings once they have all germinated and decide whether to keep it indoors or move it outside depending on how the weather pans out. Last summer, for example, they would have stayed in.

It’s an attractive plant with feathery leaves, but you will be growing it for the seeds – another reason for needing a long season. The flowers are white (sometimes pink), after flowering you should see the seeds form. Pick them off the plant when they turn yellowy in colour and let them dry somewhere sunny – on a plate in the kitchen, say – until they go brown. Then they’re ready to be stored in a clean airtight jar and used as you would use the shop-bought version. Cumin seeds mature at different rates – there won’t be one single day when you can go and harvest all the seeds – so you will need to keep an eye on the plants and pick off the seeds as and when and add them to the kitchen plate.

I think it would be going some to grow enough cumin to become self-sufficient, but you should get enough for a few special occasion meals.

Fancy a challenge?

The plants listed above are all relatively easy to grow, whether indoors or outdoors, and should give you a decent harvest in favourable conditions. The spices and aromatics listed below present far more of a challenge - often because even if you managed to raise a tropical plant in the UK climate, you would have to wait many years for the plant to mature and produce its edible seed. It's not too surprising, therefore, that spices have been so highly prized and priced throughout history.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is grown mainly for its bark, though its leaves are used in curries as well. It has been a much-prized spice for hundreds of years - there is a fascinating history of the trade in cinnamon here .
You won't be able to grow cinnamon for its bark in the UK, but you could grow it in a pot in a conservatory and use leaves in teas and curries.

To use as a garnish, try growing cinnamon basil – a basil variety whose leaves have a definite cinnamon aroma. This can be grown exactly as Thai or ordinary basil.

Cardamom

Cardamom is a tropical rainforest plant. Best place would be a steamy bathroom, or an indoor heated swimming pool, should you have one. Kew Gardens has some advice on growing cardamom plants here, and Plants4Presents currently has plants for sale.

Don’t sow the culinary seeds that you buy in the shops, as they’re harvested unripe and then dried for kitchen use.

Saffron

Saffron is extracted from the stamens of the saffron crocus. It's a painstaking process which must be done by hand, which is why saffron has traditionally been one of the most expensive spices in the world. I have tried growing crocuses for saffron, with dismal results, but there is a good online guide at Nurseries Online here. You plant in the summer and harvest saffron from the stamens of the flowers in autumn. You’ll need a pair of tweezers and it’s very fiddly.

Star anise

In theory, growing star anise, which is native to China, would be perfectly possible as a pot plant, indoors in winter, outdoors in summer. If only I could find one - and if anyone knows of a star anise plant supplier in the UK, please tell me!

The star anise likes acid soil – it’s distantly related to magnolia – and lots of water. Once you get the plant established, it could be up to 10 years or more before it bears flowers and fruit – the star anise itself is the dried egg-shaped fruit in the star-shaped casing. The star anise ‘flowers’ that you buy here have been picked when immature and unripe and then dried, so you can’t reconstitute the seeds and grow the plant from there, unfortunately: the seeds are undeveloped and empty.

Peppercorns

The peppercorn vine is native to India and grows happily in Vietnam, but temperatures here, even in a greenhouse, are just too low. Peppercorns are the fruit of the vine, which are dried and can then be further treated. Black pepper, for example is cooked and dried peppercorns; green pepper is dried unripe fruit and white pepper is made up of dried ripe seeds. Pink peppercorns, however, are from a different plant: the Peruvian pepper tree, Schinus molle, or its relative the Brazilian pepper tree, Schinus terebinthifolius.

Although conventional pepper can’t be grown here, you can always try Szechuan pepper, which is comparatively easy - see Mark Diacono's guide in his book A Taste of the Unexpected.

Szechuan pepper is botanically related to citrus plants rather than pepper vines, but it will still give you a hot peppery hit along with some more complex citrus notes as well. It’s hardy in the cold and so long as you plant two of them (a male plant and a female plant), they will supply with you fruits – the Szechuan peppers – for a good few years.

Cloves

Originally from the Indonesian spice islands, cloves like it hot and humid. In its natural habitat a clove seed will develop it a full-grown tree up to 12 metres tall and spreading eight metres; it's next to impossible to recreate the conditions it likes in the UK outside a very large heated glasshouse. Bear in mind also that what is sold in the shops is a dried flower bud, not a seed, so cannot be planted, and that it takes 20 years for the trees to start producing flower buds.

Nutmeg

See cloves, above, for the optimal growing conditions, although they are speedy developers in comparison since the first nutmegs, the seeds of the tree, will be produced about 7-9 years after planting.

General tips for growing spice plants

These will tend to be tropical plants; by default in the UK they will have to come indoors in winter;
Many also tend to grow in rainforest conditions; they don’t necessarily need lots of hot sun, but moist warm shade;
Plants which grow on the forest floor are used to lots of organic matter but not necessarily very fertile soil;
Don’t assume that a plant with edible seeds will have other edible parts, eg, cumin. (Although it might have, eg, turmeric);
Choose whether to try to grow your plant from seed – may be cheaper and more obtainable, or whether to buy a plant to nurture – may be the only viable way to acquire;
When searching the Internet for cultivation advice, check whether the site is referring to the UK, US, Australia or indeed anywhere else. You’ll find sites telling you how easy it is to grow cinnamon or talking about the benefits of growing lemon grass as hedging, and then find they are talking about Louisiana and Brisbane respectively.

The Secret Garden Club's ginger harvest

Guests were able to take away a selection of seeds, a handful of overwintering onions and chillies picked fresh from the plant, to try raising their own spice plants.

Learn to smoke

The Secret Garden Club returned on November 20 with a session on techniques for smoking food. Taking in tea-smoking, hot-smoking and cold-smoking, Zia Mays explained the principles of each method, using a wide variety of ingredients, while MsMarmiteLover turned the smoked foods into a delicious smoky-themed tea for everyone.

Guests were welcomed with a vodka and smoked lemonade cocktail, before the fires were lit in earnest and smoke wafted into the air.

Smoking techniques
Tea-smoking is a method of hot-smoking, ie, the food is cooked at the same time as being smoked. It uses a mix of tea leaves, brown sugar, raw rice and optional aromatics as the smoking medium. With the mix set in a pan under a steamer, the smoke generated infuses foods in the steamer basket with a delicate, elusive tea-smoke flavour.

Secret Garden Club tea-smoking mix:
Half a (US) cup of Lapsang Souchong tea leaves (about 30g)
Half a (US) cup of brown sugar (about 75g)
Half a (US) cup of raw long-grain rice (about 75g)
This was used to smoke:
Trout fillets - marinaded for one hour beforehand in whisky;
Tomatoes - cut in half hemispherically and lightly roasted in the oven for 20 minutes before smoking.

Also good with chicken - use thin fillets to ensure they are cooked through, duck, quail. With tea-smoking, less is definitely more: over-smoke the food and you'll be left with a distinct aftertaste of fag packet.

Hot-smoking over wood applies direct heat to soaked woodchips so that they smoulder gently. The wood and the food are both in a sealed unit so that the heat and smoke permeate the food to cook and smoke it at the same time.

Important: when smoking food with any kind of wood, it is vitally important that the wood is raw, and untreated. Any sort of treatment, coating, glue or varnish will give off potentially toxic fumes when smoked - NOT what you want coating your food. If the wood you want to use has been cut with a chainsaw, beware - there could easily be oil residues on the wood from the chainsaw. It's highly satisfying to use wood that you have chopped or sourced yourself, but you must be 100% certain that the wood is free of any chemicals.

We smoked vegetables in the hot-smoker:

Sweet peppers;
Pumpkins, cut into thin wedges and marinaded for two hours beforehand in a mix of soy sauce and maple syrup;
Chillies;
Tofu, cut into thick slices and marinaded for two hours beforehand.
Sweetcorn, on the cob;
Apples, following a baked apple recipe but with added smokiness.

Basic marinade for the tofu, pumpkins:
3 tbsp soy sauce
3 tbsp maple syrup
A dash of sesame oil
A dash of olive oil
Half a teasp of English mustard powder

The sweetcorn and baked apples were particularly successful. We've had variable results with tofu: firstly, try to get firm tofu so that it doesn't disintegrate when you try to handle it. Tofu definitely needs to be marinaded first for a good two hours - and a more Japanese style marinade with mirin and wasabi would also work well here.

Cold-smoking is the technique we associate most with fish - think smoked salmon, smoked mackerel, smoked haddock - and meat - smoked bacon. However, it's also used to smoke cheese (such as applewood-smoked cheddar) and bulbs of garlic. When you expose food to cold, or cool, smoke, the food does not cook, although the smoke will penetrate the food more thoroughly than when hot-smoked.

Fish (and meat) will need to be salted, or brined, before it is cold-smoked. To salt, say, a side of salmon, cover completely in salt and keep it, weighted down, in the fridge for around 18-24 hours. Brining it creates a sweeter cure: make up a salt/sugar solution, completely immerse the fish in this and store, covered, in the fridge for around eight hours. (Smaller fillets may take less time.)

Simple brine

100g brown sugar

75g salt

1 litre water

Plenty of other flavours can be added to this, eg, fennel, onions, garlic, herbs.

Reasons for brining:

· The salt and/or sugar in the brine help the preserving process;

· Salting/brining inhibits bacteria which might otherwise multiply while the fish is being smoked;

· Both salt and sugar add flavour to the fish;

Once salted/brined, rinse the fish well to get rid of excess salt, then dry it, ideally for a couple of hours or so, in a cool, well-ventilated place. Only then it is ready to smoke. We also smoked cheddar cheese and garlic bulbs – these do not need brining or curing but can go straight into the cold smoker.

With cold-smoking, the challenge is to generate smoke that is cool when it reaches your food. The ideal temperature range in the smoker is between 26 and 30 degrees Celsius (80-90 degrees Fahrenheit). If the temperature exceeds 37 degrees C (100 F), then the fish will get too warm. It will lose moisture and may start to cook.

An obvious way to do this is to burn your wood in one place, channel the smoke through piping so that it cools as it goes, and direct it into a smokehouse. But if you just want to try out some cold-smoking, this is quite a cumbersome operation. Remember also, your fire needs to burn wood only (see warnings about wood-burning, above), and your piping and smokehouse should be lined with non-reactive material.

Costs can be kept down by making your smokehouse from household items such as an old fridge (cut a hole in one side to take the piped smoke, or a filing cabinet (popular because the file rods are handy to hang fish fillets from), or even a cardboard box (remember, the smoke is cool when it reaches the box).

We demonstrated a method which is quick to set up, and uses everyday items so is handy for anyone who wants to experiment but isn’t sure that they want to spend time constructing a semi-permanent smokehouse. In this option, we use the smallest possible heat point to generate a comparatively large amount of smoke.

You will need:

A deep-based, or kettle barbecue, such as a Weber

A soldering iron

A tin can, eg a Baxters soup tin

Woodchips (see notes, on sourcing wood, above)

Silver foil

A standard outdoor thermometer (recommended)

A bag of ice (may not be necessary but have one on standby)

A power extension cable

Note: the soldering iron must have no solder on it AT ALL. This is your heat source and smoking lead is a very bad idea indeed. Best to buy a new soldering iron for about a tenner and use it exclusively for cold-smoking.

Many tins these days, especially supermarket own-brand cans, are lined. You should use an unlined tin. We haven’t researched exhaustively for suitable brands, but Baxters’ soup tins are unlined, and the soup’s OK as well.

While the tin is still full, make a hole in it at the end (we used a sharpening steel and a hammer), opposite the ring-pull if there is one. The hole needs to be just big enough to fit the tip and arm of the soldering iron. Empty and wash out the tin, and let it dry.

Carefully peel back the lid of the tin using the ring-pull about half way. Fill just over half the tin with your wood chips. Close the lid as far as possible, then push the soldering iron through the hole so that it’s fully inserted in the tin and the arm is in direct contact with the woodchips. This is your ‘firepit’.

Put the tin in the bottom of the barbecue. Lay the food to be smoked on the silver foil on the top rack. Gently ease the soldering iron cable out of the barbecue and plug into the extension socket. Place the lid on the barbecue as tightly as possible allowing for the fact that the soldering iron cable will prevent it from closing fully. Switch on the power to the extension cable. You should start to see wisps of smoke emerge from under the lid within 5 mins.

With tin, soldering iron and food positioned this way, the smoke around the food should stay cool enough to cold smoke properly. We recommend you place a thermometer on the rack next to the food and check the temperature regularly. On a sunny day, the outside temperature may make the barbecue heat up – and it’s not something to do in midsummer. Cold smoking this way is a wintertime occupation. If you do see the temperature rising much above 30 degrees, slide a bag of ice into the bottom of the barbecue. This should bring the temperature down to the safe range and keep it there.

While the woodchip tin is smoking, prepare a second one. The tins will last about 90 mins to 2 hours, so, when the first is exhausted, unplug the soldering iron, remove it and the tin from the barbecue, and switch the soldering iron from tin 1 to tin 2. Tin 1 can now be emptied and reused.

Timings

Cheddar cheese

Lightly smoked: 3 hours

Medium smoked: 6 hours

Garlic bulbs

Light to medium smoked: 6 hours

Salmon fillets

Lightly smoked: 12 hours

Secret Garden Club Smoking Workshop

Menu

Vodka and smoked lemonade cocktail

Tea-smoked trout and tomato, watercress salad

Smoked cheese and garlic toasted sandwiches

Smoked salmon with cucumber pickles

Marinaded smoked pumpkin slices

Marinaded smoked tofu

Smoked sweet peppers and hot chillies

Smoked glazed sweetcorn

Smoked baked apples with Jameson whisky

Even if the Med diet wasn’t being held up as healthy and life-extending, it would surely be hard to resist the fruit and vegetables that make up the bulk of the diet. Brightly coloured peppers like toddlers’ toys, the deep red of ripe tomatoes with the promise of a burst of sweet-sharp juice when you cut into them, the deep velvet plush of aubergines ... there is a sensual delight here that you just don't get with parsnips, say, or turnips.

The ease with which these raw ingredients can be transformed into a finished dish is seductive too. Some chopped and fried garlic, a dressing of olive, oil, a squeeze of lemon juice and some herbs and you’re done. This is the rough basis for ratatouille, for pasta al pomodoro, for imam bayildi, and many others.

As with so many fruits and vegetables, what is readily available in the shops is only a fraction of the variety which exists. Commercial wholesalers make stocking decisions based on looks and uniformity, on disease resistance, on length of life in storage, which means that only a narrow range will be eligible for the shelves.

In growing your own Mediterranean vegetables, however, you only need to consider which types would taste the best and give you that intense Mediterranean flavour, that burst of warmth and sunshine and memory of thyme-scented hillsides. The idea of bringing a little of the Mediterranean back from your holidays on to the patio at home is very beguiling. These are attractive plants, not too difficult to raise from seed, which grow happily in pots, and so needn’t take up too much space.

On Sunday, the Secret Garden Club will look at the sowing, raising, harvesting and cooking of a wide variety of Mediterranean fruits and vegetables – including some interesting varieties of aubergines, chillies, peppers and tomatoes mentioned above, but also some others as well. If you’d like to find out just how you can bring a bit of the Med back to your back garden, and enjoy MsMarmiteLover’s famous and creative afternoon teas into the bargain, click here for booking details.

Smoked out

The Secret Garden Club held its second smoking workshop on Sunday March 18: the notes that follow reflect the activities of the day and vary slightly from the blog post following the first smoking day in November 2011.

Smoking is a technique which imparts a distinctive flavour to food and can also change its texture slightly. Our ancestors smoked food for its preservative effect, and while food which has been smoked will take longer to go off, these days, it is for the smoke flavour plus any aromatics that may have been added to the smoke mix, that makes the food so delicious.

We looked at three different methods of smoking food during the afternoon. Tea-smoking uses a mix of sugar, rice and tea leaves which are heated until they smoulder to produce a fragrant smoke which both cooks and flavours food.

Hot-smoking over wood applies heat to wood chips in order to cook food and to flavour it more strongly. Cold smoking involves exposing food to cool smoke for a much longer period of time, from several hours to a couple of days and will both flavour and preserve food without cooking it.

Tea-smoking uses a mix of tea leaves, brown sugar, raw rice and optional aromatics as the smoking medium. With the mix set in a pan under a steamer, the smoke generated infuses foods in the steamer basket with a delicate, elusive tea-smoke flavour.

Secret Garden Club tea-smoking mix:
Half a (US) cup of tea leaves (about 4 tbsp)
Half a (US) cup of brown sugar (about 4 tbsp)
Half a (US) cup of raw long-grain rice (about tbsp)

Mix the ingredients together, then make a foil saucer that fits into the bottom of the base pan. Pour the smoking mixture on to the foil (this is to protect the pan itself from staining), set it over the heat and fit the steamer basket and lid.

The trout fillets were laid on the steamer basket just as the smoke began to curl upwards through the slats, and steamed for around 20 minutes. Times will vary and our fillets were quite chunky. With fish, remove from the smoker as soon as they are opaque all the way through so that they don't overcook. With tea-smoking, less is definitely more: over-smoke the food and you'll be left with a distinct aftertaste of fag packet.

Hot-smoking over wood applies direct heat to soaked woodchips so that they smoulder gently. The wood and the food are both in a sealed unit so that the heat and smoke permeate the food to cook and smoke it at the same time. You can use the same equipment as for tea-smoking, above, ideally on an outdoor cooker. The process will produce much more smoke than with tea-smoking, so if you do have to hot smoke over wood indoors, open all windows and doors first and turn up your extractor fan - although you will probably set off your smoke alarm even so.

Important: when smoking food with any kind of wood, it is vitally important that the wood is raw, and untreated. Any sort of treatment, coating, glue or varnish will give off potentially toxic fumes when smoked - NOT what you want coating your food. If the wood you want to use has been cut with a chainsaw, beware - there could easily be oil residues on the wood from the chainsaw. It's highly satisfying to use wood that you have chopped or sourced yourself, but you must be 100% certain that the wood is free of any chemicals.

We used a proprietary hot-smoker - very similar to this one - set up outside on the terrace.

Sweet peppers, sliced in half and with seeds removed;
Lemons, cut in half;
Tofu, cut into thick slices and marinaded for two hours beforehand in soy sauce and maple syrup;
Sweetcorn, on the cob;
Halloumi cheese

These were all smoked over hickory chips for 25-30 minutes. It's well worth experimenting with different types of wood, so long as you stick to hardwoods. We were asked on Sunday about smoking with pine to get that distinctive resinated flavour. But pine, and also cedar, contain too much in the way of tars and resins to smoke successfully and can even ruin your smoker. Fruit woods, such as pear, apple, or cherry, are all popularly used for smoking. Oak, beech and hickory are also classic smoking woods.

Marinade for tofu

3 tbsp soy sauce
3 tbsp maple syrup
2 tsps olive oil
Half a teasp of English mustard

Whisk all ingredients well together. This was also used to glaze the sweetcorn immediately prior to smoking.

Cold-smoking is the technique we associate most with fish (smoked salmon, smoked mackerel, smoked haddock) and meat (smoked bacon). However, it's also used to smoke cheese (such as applewood-smoked cheddar) and bulbs of garlic. When you expose food to cold, or cool, smoke, the food does not cook, although the smoke will penetrate the food more thoroughly than when hot-smoked.

Fish (and meat) will need to be salted, or brined, before it is cold-smoked. To salt, say, a side of salmon, find a baking tray on which the salmon will fit comfortably. Spread a layer of rock salt on the base of the tray. Lay the salmon, skin side down on the rock salt, and cover completely with more salt. Other aromatics can be added as well: lemon slices, herbs, beetroot, some gin or vidka maybe. Now place a second baking tray on top of the salmon and salt, and weight it down by placing tins or full jars on the top. Slide the whole lot into the fridge and leave for 12-24 hours.

Remove the salmon, reserving the salt mixture and drain away any liquid generated during this first salting. Turn the fish over on the rock salt base, so that it's now skin side up. Cover again with salt and aromatics (you may need more). Weight down again as before. Put the tray and salmon combo back in the fridge for another 12-24 hours.

Brining it creates a sweeter cure: make up a salt/sugar solution in cold water, completely immerse the fish in this and store, covered, in the fridge for around 8-12 hours. (Smaller fillets may take less time.)

Simple brine

100g brown sugar

75g salt

1 litre water

Plenty of other flavours can be added to this, eg, fennel, onions, garlic, herbs. Or go Asian with star anise, cinnamon, lemongrass or lime.

Once salted/brined, rinse the fish well to get rid of excess salt, then dry it, ideally for a couple of hours or so, in a cool, well-ventilated place. Only then it is ready to smoke. We also smoked Camembert cheese, salt, aubergines and garlic bulbs – these do not need brining or curing but can go straight into the cold smoker.

A second solution is to generate the smoke from as small a heat source as possible. We used a ProQ smoke generator, available online from Mac's BBQ, and Amazon among other places, placed in the bottom of an ordinary kettle barbecue. If you don't have a deep barbecue, you could try making a smokehouse out of an old fridge, or a discarded filing cabinet (popular because the file rods are handy to hang fish fillets from), or even a cardboard box (while the smoke should be cool when it reaches the box, place the smoke generator itself on foil or something non-reactive and fireproof).

The ProQ is filled with smoke dust in a spiral pattern. The outer ring of the spiral is heated by a small tealight which can then be removed when the wood dust starts to smoulder. It will continue to smoulder for up to ten hours. It's an effective, tidy way to generate cool smoke, although we found that it didn't always produce very much smoke. Two ProQ smoke generators would probably be ideal, but expensive.

If you don't want to shell out for commercial kit straightaway, try the tin + soldering iron method instead. For this you need a deep container, again such as a kettle barbecue, a soldering iron, an empty 400g food tin, and your woodchips. For this method you'll also need access to a power supply.

Important: the soldering iron must have no solder on it AT ALL. You do not want smouldering lead contaminating your woodsmoke. Ideally, buy a new soldering iron for about a tenner and use it exclusively for cold-smoking.

Also note: many food tins these days, especially supermarket own-brand cans, are lined with a plastic coating. You should use an unlined tin - Baxter's soup cans are unlined, for example.

Before you empty the contents of the tin, make a hole in it at the top end (we used a sharpening steel and a hammer), opposite the ring-pull if there is one. The hole needs to be just big enough to fit the tip and arm of the soldering iron. This is much easier to do when the tin is full; the lid tends to buckle and collapse if you empty the contents first. Wash out the tin, and let it dry.

Using the ring-pull, carefully peel back the lid of the tin about half way. Fill just over half the tin with your wood chips. Close the lid as far as possible, then push the soldering iron through the hole so that it’s fully inserted in the tin and the arm is in direct contact with the woodchips.

Put the tin with the soldering iron inserted in the bottom of the barbecue. Lay the food to be smoked on silver foil on the top rack. Carefull trail the soldering iron's cable out of the barbecue and plug into the power supply. Place the lid on the barbecue as tightly as possible allowing for the fact that the soldering iron cable will prevent it from closing fully. Switch on the power to the extension cable. You should start to see wisps of smoke emerge from under the lid within 5 mins.

With the soldering iron and tin at the bottom of the barbecue and the food laid out at the top, the smoke around the food should stay cool enough to cold smoke properly. If you have an outdoor thermometer, it's a good idea to place it on the rack next to the food, so that you can check the temperature regularly. On a sunny day, the outside temperature may heat up the interior of the barbecue. If you do see the temperature rising much above 30 degrees, slide a bag of ice into the bottom of the barbecue next to the tin of woodchips. This should bring the temperature down to the safe range and keep it there.

Smoking workshop March 2012

Menu

Rum punch with smoked lemons

Smoked trout salad

Halloumi salad with tomatoes

Smoked marinaded tofu

Smoked red peppers

Smoked sweetcorn

Smoked aubergine curry

Selection of smoked cheeses

Monday, August 10, 2015

Grow Your Own Curry

Learn to smoke

A taste of the Mediterranean

Smoked out