Smashed at the Weekend #3

Cook Mike Davies's beef shin osso buco, read the Sketch book by Pierre Gagnaire, dine and stay at Pennyhill Park Hotel and more

Something to cook

Beef shin osso buco, saffron puntalette and orange gremolata by Mike Davies

Mike Davies is the chef-owner of The Camberwell Arms and Frank’s Cafe Peckham, both in London. He has also just written his first cookbook Cooking for People and it’s a rather lovely thing. Four of the book’s chapters - Summer, Winter, Autumn, Spring - offer four different three-course seasonal menus. If you want to tackle a whole meal, each comes with very handy shopping and prep list which makes the task so much easier. Equally, you can just cherry pick recipes as you would in any other cookbook.

In addition there’s a whole chapter on Sunday lunch (rib of beef please, although the aubergine and courgette lasagne does sound very good - there are vegetarian and vegan dishes throughout the book) and a short section entitled ‘Extra Good Things’ which covers snacks such as ‘beer onions and spicly nuts’ and ‘Scotch bonnet pork fat and peppers on toast.’

Cooking for People is a collection of comforting and appealing dishes that are achievable to make and bring some of the practical benefits of the workings of a professional kitchen into the home i.e. showing you how and when to do your food preparation at the optimum time and in the right order, rather than complicated cheffy flourishes. There are countless things you’ll want to make including pumpkin and Swiss chard rotolo with burst tomatoes and brown butter or ginger loaf with poached pears and cream, but this short rib recipe particularly caught my eye.

‘This is a foundational recipe, in as much as it can be embellished in so many different ways. At its core, it is a slow-cooked piece of beef shin, a cut that’s designed for long cooking. Full of sinew and connective tissue, with some time and a gentle hand it becomes meltingly tender. The beef can be cooked up to 5 days in advance and refrigerated, and there is an argument for this being beneficial as the whole dish spends time getting to know itself better before being served. The puntalette is the perfect bed to rest the beef upon, with the earthy saffron and roasting juices forming a luxurious sauce. The puntalette can be made in advance and reanimated with water and additional seasoning on the day.’

For the osso buco 

 1–1.5kg cross-cut beef shin (ask your butcher to cut it into pieces) 
 1 bunch of thyme  
4 bay leaves  
2 tbsp neutral oil 
2 white onions, diced  
2 heads of garlic, halved and unpeeled  
2 litres chicken stock 
alt and pepper  

Preheat your oven to 160°C fan/180°C/350°F/ gas mark 4. Season the beef shin heavily and tie the thyme and bay leaves together. Set a heavy-based saucepan or casserole dish with a lid over a high heat and add the oil. Fry the beef until golden brown on each side. Transfer to a plate and set aside. Turn down the heat, add the onions and season with salt, which will produce moisture from the start to lift the remains of the beefy crust stuck to the pan. Cook until tender and translucent. Return the beef to the pan and add the garlic heads and herbs. Pour in the chicken stock. The shin should be sat just proud of the stock. If you need more liquid, use water to top it up. Bring back to a simmer. Check the salt level of the broth – at this point it should be flavourful but not fully seasoned to avoid it becoming overly salty when reduced. Put the beef in the oven with the lid on for 2.5–3 hours. It’s ready when you can put a skewer or knife through it with no resistance. 

The osso buco can be served immediately or allowed to cool, refrigerated and then reheated in the oven ahead of serving. If you’re planning on making it ahead, it will keep very nicely in the fridge for up to 5 days.  

For the gremolata  

1 bunch of parsley, finely chopped  
2 garlic cloves, finely grated  
Zest of 1 orange  

Combine all the ingredients on a chopping board and continue to chop together to mix thoroughly.  

For the puntalette  

400g puntalette (aka orzo) 
Generous pinch of saffron  
100g butter  
200ml double cream 
 50g Parmesan  

Blanch the pasta in boiling salted water. When the pasta is tender, reserve a large ladleful of the starchy pasta water and drain the rest. In a separate saucepan, heat some of the roasting juices from the osso buco with the saffron. Melt a tablespoon of the butter in the now empty pasta pan, then add the pasta back in. Stir in the saffron-infused roasting juices, the reserved pasta water and the cream, and simmer until the sauce has come together but is still quite loose. Remove from the heat. The pasta will keep absorbing liquid as it cools, so it’s important to leave a little wetness. (At this point you can cool the mix completely and keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to serve. To reheat the pasta, add a splash of water and gently bring it up to temperature.) Fold in the remaining butter, the Parmesan and a little gremolata.  

To plate  

Parmesan to serve 

Spoon the puntalette onto your serving plate so that it spreads and place the beef shin on top. Shower with more gremolata and Parmesan. 

Extracted from Cooking for People by Mike Davies
£30, Pavilion
Use the following affiliate link to buy the book and support Smashed: click here to buy

Something to eat

The Discovey Tasting Menu, The Latymer at Pennyhill Park Hotel

Brixham sea bass with roscoff onion, mustard, smoked eel and parsley

The Latymer restaurant at Pennyhill Park has a long history as a gastronomic destination with chefs such as Duncan Ray (now at The Little Fish Market in Hove), Michael Wigall (now at the Michelin starred The Angel at Hetton) and Matthew Worswick (most recently at The Cliff, Barbados) among others heading up the kitchens. Since 2019, Steve Smith has been behind the stove. Smith previously held a Michelin star at Bohemia in Jersey and was awarded another in 2021. The Latymer is also one of just 19 restaurants to hold five AA rosettes; other recipients include Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, L’enclume and The Fat Duck.

Smith’s six course Discovery menu in The Latymer’s cosy and romatic dining room last weekend impressed with it’s combination of refined technique, high quality ingredients and imaginative flavour combinations. Highlights included a gorgeous dish of sweetbreads with chervil root, a marmlade-like prepration of kalamansi, and Iberico ham, and a slighly more classical composition of spankingly fresh and beautifully cooked Brixham sea bass with roscoff onion, mustard, smoked eel and parsley.

Special mention is also due to some winning wine pairings, with the stone fruit flavours of Domaine Ostertag Pinot Blanc Pinot Gris 2021 from Alsace really enhancing that sea bass dish and the Californian Ridge Vineyards, Lytton Estate Petit Syrah 2018 bringing some mellow blackcurrent fruitfulness to a slice of Brett Graham’s Aynhoe fallow deer served with chicory, orange and buckthorn.

There were are of course more than six courses served, including a mini-loaf of some of the best sourdough I can recall eating, as well as some jewel-like canapes/snacks in the bar, but the meal was well paced and we didn’t feel defeated by either the duration or the amount of food served. Nevertheless, we were grateful to be able to slope off to our quiet, extremely comfortable and generously proportioned room (OK, it was a massive suite) and crash out, dreaming about Spenwood cheese and truffle gourgeres.

The details
The Latymer Discovery Menu costs £175 per person. Double rooms at Pennyhill Park cost from £328 per night including breakfast. The Latymer Dine & Stay deal including the Discovery menu, overnight stay, breakfast and spa access costs from £705 (Wednesday - Saturday) and £599 (Sunday) per room.

Contact
Pennyhill Park, London Road, Bagshot, Surrey, GU19 5EU
exclusive.co.uk/pennyhill-park; 01276 478300

(Smashed were guests of Pennyhill Park hotel)

Something to read

Sketch by Mourad Mazouz and Pierre Gagnaire

Twelve years in the making and nine years behind schedule, Sketch the book has finally arrived. At nearly 450 pages long and standing over a foot high, it’s not any old cookbook just as Sketch in London isn’t any old restaurant and bar. Algerian-born Mourad Mazouz is the visionary restauranteur who opened Momo, one of the hottest London restaurants of the late 90s. In 2002 he teamed up with three Michelin starred avant garde French chef Pierre Gagnaire and opened the design-led Sketch in a very grand grade II listed property in Mayfair.

The dazzlingly over the top Lecture Room and Library restaurant on the top floor eventually won three Michelin stars, but Sketch is not just about fine dining. The warren of stunningly designed spaces (there really is nowhere quite like it) also offers all day dining, afternoon tea, late night drinking and live music. And if you know one thing about Sketch it will be that it has iconic egg-shaped pod toilets which are given two double page spreads in the book.

The lavishly illustrated book tells the whole story from building site to Michelin glory in words and quotes and pictures (lots and lots of pictures) and illustrations and recipes. You can cook from Sketch; there’s a recipe for carrot and hazelnut muffins from The Parlour all day dining restaurant which you are probably more likely to make than The Lecture Room’s ‘Gilladeau oysters and plain scallops, grated pink radishes with horseradish cress palet biscuit, smoked and iodised parsley water’, but you probably won’t want to get cake batter or herb and oil stains all over your £75 book.

A pink monolith, Sketch is not a practical thing, but it is a beautiful and inspiring one. The publishers call it a ‘dreamscape book’. I’d call it a mad ride through the minds of two people who might well be geniuses.

The details
Sketch by Mourad Mazouz and Pierre Gagnaire
£75, Bloomsbury Absolute
Use the following affiliate link to buy the book and support Smashed: click here to buy

Something to watch

Culinary Class Wars

I love sneering at Gregg Wallace’s idiotic comments on Masterchef as much as the next man, but after 17 series the whole thing is getting a bit tired. There’s only 32 contestants for a start, the studio setting is a bit posh-cookery-school-bland and literally no one is swearing in Korean. So hurrah for Culinary Class Wars, a Korean TV series on Netflix that sees no less than 100 contestants battle it out in a jaw-droppingly huge and dramatically lit arena that looks like a cross between a prison and a hi-spec professional kitchen. It’s Honey, I Blew up Iron Chef (does that help or are both of those references too obscure? If you haven’t seen any of the many versions of Iron Chef, do track one down. Don’t worry so much about the Rick Moranis opus Honey, I Blew Up The Kid although you can watch it on Disney+ if you’ve got 89 minutes of your life you don’t really care about).

The contestants are assigned into two classes: 80 ‘Black Spoons’ - ‘unkown chefs whose talents are yet to be discovered by the world’ and are referred to only by nicknames such as ‘Yakitori King’ and ‘Meat Master’, and 20 White Spoons’ - established star chefs including Korean-American Edward Lee and chef and TV personality Choi Hyun-seok. It’s a battle of Black Spoons against White Spoons, but only 20 of the Black Spoon chefs who survive the initial elimination rounds will get to compete head to head with the WhiteSspoon class, reveal their real names to the watching millions and win 300 million won (about £165K).

The show is judged by leading South Korean restaurateur and TV personality Paik Jong-won and three Michelin-starred chef Anh Sung-jae of Mosu Seoul restaurant. Instead of a sentient celeriac yelling ‘sweet-sharp-saltiness’ there are actual experts appraising the food. It’s tense, dramatic and ever so slightly silly. The first episode takes a while to get going (there’s a lot to explain and a lot of chefs to introduce) but once the chefs are in the kitchen, it’s compelling stuff. I’m sure there’s an important point about social stratification and social mobility being made, but at heart, it’s a TV cooking competition, and they don’t come bigger, battier or better than Culinary Class Wars.

Something to support

Two restaurant crowdfunders - The Chilli Pickle, Brighton and The Barrington Boar, Somerset

The Chilli Pickle and The Barrington Boar

Two of my favourite restaurants have launched crowdfunders this week. In Brighton, the much-loved modern Indian restaurant The Chilli Pickle is moving from its current location in MyHotel in Jubilee Street to new premises in the historic Lanes, a few doors from where the restaurant first opened 16 years ago. They are converting a former retail space and are offering a variety of packages (e.g. £100 will buy you a voucher worth £120 to spend in the restaurant) to help them fund the fit-out and therefore avoid borrowing from the bank. Find out more by clicking here.

The Barrington Boar is a wonderful gastropub with rooms set in an idyllic Somerset village. It’s run by husband and wife team Alasdair Clifford and Victoria Collins who worked in some top London restaurants including Chez Bruce before re-locating to the countryside in 2018. The pub is listed in all the guides and is currently 35 in the Top 50 Gastropubs list.

The couple have now expanded into the next-door premises - ‘Bakers Farm’ - which they are converting into additional accommodation (there are currently four comfortable, cosy and stylish rooms at the pub). That’s quite the building project, but they also have grand designs for the grounds, hence the crowdfunder. The couple say they want to create ‘a functional, welcoming space that benefits visitors to The Barrington Boar, our local community & Barrington’s ecosystem’ and that their plans include ‘a Market Garden which will supply the kitchen, the planting of native Somerset fruit trees, a Slow Food UK allotment and orchard which will grow forgotten local plants and a community plot where the team plan to invite local groups to use the space for garden therapy.’

Rewards range from a specially designed Slow Food X The Barrington Boar Tea Towel for £15 to a long weekend stay at Bakers Farm for 6 people for £2000. Special events include a night hosted by Bruce Poole of Chez Bruce and an evening with Slow Food UK hosted by Executive Chairman of Slow Food UK Shane Holland. Find out more by clicking here.