Austerity and Horsemeat

Recent events have pointed to the fact that there are two ways to be economical in the kitchen: the first is to buy cheap rubbish; the second to devote some time to making the best of basic ingredients.

It is not a massive shock that processed foods at the very bottom end of the market should be the ones where inexplicably horsemeat has been discovered. The explanations that spring to mind are that somewhere in the chain there was a genuine error; or that in that same chain someone did it deliberately. It is hard to imagine circumstances in which 29 per cent of a burger could be horsemeat by accidental contamination, but you never know. 

Behind that, however, is the fact that the continual downward pressure on suppliers by supermarkets is likely to end in some sort of error: if your prices are shaved to the bone you cannot afford the very best monitoring systems, best people, most reliable suppliers of your own raw materials, the numbers on duty you would want, etc. So the supermarket buyer filling the trolley with the very cheapest stuff is not - generally - getting the best and purest - big shock.

With burgers, the product that has caused the furore, it is pretty easy to make your own for not very much, and to enjoy the process rather than the processed. Buy some mince from a reliable supplier; use some stale bread to make breadcrumbs; chop an onion finely; mix together with an egg for binding and seasoning to taste, then form the burgers in your floured hands and grill or fry them. 

I started this post saying it was economical buying rubbish, but that is not really true. As Elizabeth David once wrote, a bad meal is expensive at any price. 

Bread-stick Bonus

Baking rolls yesterday to go with homemade burgers I had some dough left over. Waste not etc, so I decided to give bread-sticks a go.

The dough btw was made (in my bread-maker) with 3/4 strong white bread flour and 1/4 cornmeal, largely because I have some cornmeal that needs using soon, but also because it gives a nice hint of gold to the end product. As I've had problems with bread rising of late I used a whole sachet of dried yeast, part of which was revived in some warm milk. It seemed to work well.

Forming the sticks was a challenge, but fun. It took me back to infant school days playing with plasticine, rolling a small ball into a sausage into a snake. As with those rather earlier efforts the final shape was less than even, but that (I hope) added a certain rustic charm to the snack.

The uncooked sticks were placed on a steel tray and left to rise for an hour or so, then put into the top of an oven just set to 220C (that is, they were put in a cool oven as it heated to 220C). I do that instead of putting bread in a pre-heated oven to give it a bit more rising. They took longer to bake than I had expected, almost as long as the sizeable bread rolls, so approaching 20 minutes, though I took the very thinnest out sooner, judging by their colour that they were done.


Sternest critic - my son - tried one and said less than flatteringly that he didn't believe I had made them. Crunchy, with a nice yeasty bread flavour, they were a winner, and I'll do more in future. On my austerity hobby-horse they were almost free, made from a scrap of dough that might have been binned otherwise (though I would probably have made a small roll for later use).



The picture shows the fatter models as the thin ones went almost instantly.

If anyone in the big-wide world can given me ideas about how to make them more even, and evenly thin to boot, I'd be grateful. I'm wondering if I could get some Parmesan to cling to the surface to add another dimension, but they were very good as they were.