Aromatic Beef Pie Recipe

Week 2's Freshly Blogged challenge had many of us in a twitter . Of a generation that has never cooked with suet and grew up to regard any saturated animal fat with deep suspicion, it was a mystery. Even though my classic English cookery books have whole sections on suet puddings, I’ve never been tempted to try them out and had no idea where even to buy suet in South Africa.

In England I know you can buy packets of ready shredded, more anonymous suet, that doesn’t look like what it is – great lumps of fat taken from around the kidneys of the cow. After a long phone conversation with the friendly butcher at our local PicknPay, I managed to establish that we were talking about the same thing (his English and my non-existent Afrikaans didn’t quite stretch to the right vocab for suet) and I went in to collect it, great curvy lumps of white fat encased in a membrane. It was incredibly cheap, so not hard to see why it was a staple of those frugal English cooks of yesteryear.

Grating suet

The rest of the ingredients for the challenge were: a Knorr beef stockpot, 500g beef shin, a PnP soup pack of vegetables, star anise and white wine vinegar. We could add two fresh and one grocery ingredient and omit one ingredient from the list. I don’t know what you would have made, but I went straight for the perhaps rather obvious but delicious traditional beef stew with a lovely thick and light suet crust. The twist being the star anise.

I had no idea how the star anise flavour would work with the stew but hoped for the best. I added onions and bay leaves as my fresh and red wine as my grocery ingredient and left out the vinegar. And it worked amazingly well giving a rich and aromatic stew that the whole family ate and would happily eat again. Star anise is my new essential spice!

If you feel inspired to vote in the challenge here is my recipe on the Freshly Blogged site. And the recipe as posted follows here:

Aromatic Beef Pie Recipe
I’ve never cooked with suet before, but the English culinary and literary heritage is full of old-fashioned recipes that use suet: dumplings, steak and kidney pudding, jam roly poly pudding and of course Christmas pudding. It took no time to decide on a rich and aromatic beef stew turned into a  pie with a golden suet pastry crust. It would work equally well as individual pot pies or as one big family pie. Star anise isn’t a traditional English stew spice but it adds a mysterious extra aromatic that lifts the beef out of the ordinary without overwhelming the rest of the flavours. I complemented it with bay leaves to give some subtler undertones, and a good slug of red wine for richness.

Ingredients
For beef stew
600g beef shin
4 tablespoons flour
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 onions
1 PnP soup pack: 2 carrots, 1 stick celery, 1 small leek, 1 large tomato, 1 potato
1 tablespoon celery leaves chopped
1 Knorr beef stock pot
½ cup red wine
1 star anise
3 bay leaves
Salt and pepper

For suet crust
350g self-raising flour
175g shredded suet
Salt and pepper
Approx 1 ½ cups cold water to mix
1 egg, beaten

Method
For beef stew
Slice the onions. Peel and chop all the vegetables into bite-sized pieces.
Sift the flour onto a plate and season generously with salt and pepper. Turn the beef pieces in it until lightly coated.
Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and brown the beef in batches until browned on all sides. Remove into a casserole.
Put the chopped onions into the same frying pan and cook until starting to soften. Add the rest of the vegetables and continue cooking for 2 minutes. Add the vegetables to the casserole.
Pour the wine into the frying pan and scrape up any residue. Allow to bubble briefly and then add to the casserole. Add the beef stock pot, star anise, bay leaves and a good seasoning of salt and pepper to the casserole, then add warm water to just cover the meat. Bring to a simmer, cover with the lid and leave simmering very gently for about 3 hours, until the meat is tender and falling off the bones. Stir once or twice during that time to make sure it isn’t sticking or burning.

For crust
If using butchers suet, remove the thin membrane and grate the suet finely.
Sift the flour into a bowl. Add the grated suet and a seasoning of salt and pepper.
Mix well.
Add water a little at a time, until the dough comes together. It should have the consistency of a scone dough, quite soft but holding well together.
Roll out the suet dough on a lightly floured surface until it is about 1 cm thick and about 1 cm wider all round than the pie dish you will be using.
Note: Make the dough just before you are ready to bake the pie. It shouldn’t wait around long or the raising agent will not work so well.

Assemble the Pie
Remove the bones from the stew and break up the meat into bite-sized pieces. Put all the meat and vegetables into a 1.5 litre pie dish with a rim. The remaining liquid should already be quite thick and rich but if it is too thin you can reduce it now by boiling for a few minutes. Pour the gravy over the meat and vegetables to come just below the rim of the pie dish.
Cut the pie crust to fit the dish. Wet the rim of the dish with water and use the leftover 1 cm edges to make a raised edge around the rim. Carefully lift the rest of the crust onto the top and press down all around the edges to seal. Make a small hole in the top to allow the steam to escape.
Brush the top with beaten egg.
Bake at 190C for 25-30 minutes until the crust is golden and well risen.

Voters in the Freshly Blogged challenge get prizes too. Check out what the voters' prize is this week and then vote for my recipe if you would be so kind. Thanks!

Previous Week's challenge : My phyllo spring rolls recipe

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Chocolate Avocado Parfait Recipe

I’ve always loved avocados. I remember as a teenager growing up in England the occasional visit to a smart restaurant, where I would always order an avocado cocktail as my starter (this was the early Eighties and at the time it seemed the height of sophistication!). Now many years and half a world away, the South African winter is a time of avocado plenty – they are luscious, ripe and affordable – no longer a special treat but an everyday pleasure.

So, when invited to take part in ZZ2’s Afrikado "More than just guacamole!" Blogger Challenge, I was full of ideas for recipes using avocados, anything but guacamole was the brief. Apparently the average South African only eats two avocados a year – how can that be possible?! And ZZ2 are asking bloggers to come up with exciting and inventive ways to use avos in a bid to encourage people to eat more of these delicious and healthy, super-nutritious fruit.

The first idea I was keen to try was to use avocado in a dessert. I’d tasted a wonderful chocolate avo mousse made by a friend and wanted to expand on that to create something along the lines of a chocolate ice cream. The following recipe is what I came up with: a decadently rich chocolate parfait with a hint of orange and coconut, so velvety smooth that you would think it was full of cream, when in fact there is no dairy whatsoever!

Chocolate avocado parfait recipe – dairy-free and healthy!
Ingredients
1 large ripe avocado
4 tablespoons good cocoa powder
1 tablespoon melted coconut oil
5 tablespoons syrup (I used golden syrup)
3-4 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice

Put all the ingredients into a bowl and blend with a stick blender until smooth.
Taste and adjust for sweetness.
Spoon into a bowl, cover and chill in the freezer for 6 hours until set but still soft enough to scoop easily.

This parfait is so rich that you only need a few spoonfuls each, so this amount would easily do four people, served with a scoop of fresh orange sorbet to cut the richness.

Alternatively use immediately without chilling, as a thick sauce to drizzle over vanilla ice cream.
If you leave overnight in the freezer it will set harder than is ideal for a parfait, so allow to soften slightly in the fridge for an hour before serving.

Notes: I used golden syrup as a sweetener, as that is what I had available, but for a healthier alternative use a good maple syrup or agave.
The quantities of syrup and cocoa needed will vary according to the size of your avocado, so taste, adjust and taste again!

Disclosure: I developed this recipe to enter into the Afrikado challenge. There is a prize for the winning recipe which will be decided by a panel of judges. I received no remuneration for writing this post and bought all the ingredients myself.

For more Afrikado avo inspiration read Colleen's Green Juice Recipe

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Phyllo Spring Rolls Recipe

This has been a year full of food blogging challenges for me – first the Robertsons Spicemaster cook-off and now Freshly Blogged from PicknPay, where 50 or so bloggers are given a mystery list of ingredients and have to come up with an original recipe. It’s online, it’s over 11 weeks and the last three in compete in a cook-off at Taste of Joburg in September. You get to vote for your favourite recipes at the Freshly Blogged website and there are weekly prizes up for grabs, both for voters and bloggers, but three foodie judges decide who goes through and who is for the chop!

The first challenge had us all madly tweeting over the weekend as we trawled Cape Town’s PicknPay stores for the elusive garlic, ginger and dhania paste. I tracked mine down without too much stress along with the Findus Thai Wok frozen veg, the PnP phyllo pastry, orange and pineapple. We were allowed to omit one ingredient and I dumped the two-minute noodles, which I am deeply suspicious of as a form of nutrition, and added as my one extra ingredient peanuts. These easy phylllo spring rolls were what I came up with.

If you like the sound of them please vote for my recipe on the Freshly Blogged site! The recipe and inspiration as posted for the competition follow:

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A palm shaded warung on a family holiday in Bali, serving crisp spring rolls with peanut sauce to dip into. My kids eagerly tucked into what were essentially parcels of exotic vegetables that they’d never even consider eating in any other format. It’s the delicate crispness of the roll that lures them to overlook all that vegetable goodness within.

 So when Thai vegetables and phyllo pastry were the main ingredients of the first Freshly Blogged challenge, it was spring rolls that immediately ‘sprung’ to mind: oven baked in phylllo pastry for easy cooking and with a pineapple and peanut dipping sauce inspired part by sweet/savoury fresh Indian fruit chutneys and part by the more traditional peanut sambals of Indonesia. These spring rolls are a creative (if not very  authentic) interpretation of a holiday memory of those Balinese spring rolls, possibly the only way of convincing my kids to munch through any amount of shredded vegetables. I hope your kids, and adults, will enjoy them too!

Recipe for Phyllo Spring Rolls with Pineapple and PeanutSauce

Ingredients

250g (half pack) of PnP phyllo pastry

For spring rolls

500g Findus Thai Wok frozen vegetables

2-3 teaspoons PnP crushed garlic, ginger and dhania

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 tablespoons fresh orange juice

Salt and pepper

For sauce

1 cup chopped fresh pineapple

1/3 cup salted peanuts

1 teaspoon PnP crushed garlic, ginger and dhania

1 ½  teaspoons dark brown sugar

1 teaspoon vegetable oil

Salt and pepper

Makes 12-16 rolls

The night before you plan to cook these, put the frozen phyllo pastry in the fridge to defrost. Take the packet out of the fridge the next morning two hours before you plan to use it to bring to room temperature, otherwise the sheets will stick together..

Make the sauce by putting all the ingredients into a mug and processing with a stick blender until smooth. Check seasoning and adjust to taste.

Heat your wok until piping hot, add the 2 tablespoons oil, it should be just starting to smoke. Put in the garlic, ginger and dhania paste, immediately followed by the frozen vegetables and stir quickly together. Add a squeeze of orange juice and  stir-fry for 5-7 minutes until the vegetables are starting to become tender but still retain some crunch. If there is too much liquid in the bottom of the wok, drain it off. Leave the vegetables to cool before making the spring rolls. Refresh them just before using with another squeeze of orange juice.

Pre-heat the oven to 190C.

Take one roll of pastry from the packet. Unroll it carefully and cut it into three strips of approximately 12 cm wide. Take one piece of pastry and cover the rest. Put a spoonful of cooked vegetables at the narrow end nearest to you. Fold the sides in over the filling by 1 cm and roll up around the filling. Brush with oil to seal at the end and brush the whole roll with a light coating of oil. Place on a baking tray and continue to make the rest of the rolls. If you prefer thicker, more sturdy rolls use two sheets at a time.

Bake for 15 minutes until the edges are golden and the rolls are crisp.

Allow to cool for 5 minutes before serving with the pineapple and peanut sauce to dip.

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I’m busy creating a recipe for the second Freshly Blogged challenge already, which I’ll post here next week, then I hope to stay in for at least a few more rounds (or even right to the end!) as I’m enjoying the stimulus of coming up with new things every week!

Please vote for this recipe here - I'd very much appreciate it and will love you for ever!

NB for my non-South African readers: dhania is coriander/cilantro.

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Mildly Spiced ‘Persian’ Bean Soup Recipe

At the end of last term, our girls were performing a Persian play at school. Parents were asked to provide food with a Persian flavour; it being the middle of winter, soups and breads were suggested.  Now Persian suggests to me richly woven carpets, rosewater and perhaps jewel-like pomegranate seeds, sorbets, sherbets and such-like delicacies. I’ve obviously been reading too many fairy-tales!

For a more down to earth perspective and less daunting challenge, I turned to my trusty Madhur Jaffrey book, which includes recipes from the Middle East, Iran, Turkey and Japan, as well as India. I found several recipes that sounded good, featuring mild spices and many pulses, poor man’s Persia perhaps. In the end I created a soup inspired by elements from several recipes and added my newly favourite spice combo – garam masala. I’ve recently fallen in love with its aromatic and gentle spiciness having ignored it on the shelf for years, so it deserved a starring role for once.

Here is my final recipe, first tested at the girls’ play, then at our Midwinter Festival, at both of which events it disappeared very quickly. It finally managed to get photographed today after being served up for Middle Daughter’s 13th birthday lunch. Perhaps it doesn’t sound very birthday-ish, but she has planned  a birthday tea with chocolate cake and cheese biscuits, shortly to be followed by a braai fire with boerewors, stick bread and marshmallows, so a lunchtime healthy soup sounded like a good foundation for the feasting to follow!

It’s simple to make, filling and warming and goes down well with all but the most ardent vegetable refuseniks.

Recipe for Persian-Inspired Bean Soup
500g dried haricot or other small white beans
2 onions
1 clove garlic
2 tomatoes
2 potatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 ½  teaspoons cumin
1 ½ teaspoons garam masala
½ teaspoon turmeric
Salt and pepper
2-3 teaspoons lemon juice

Soak the beans overnight in plenty of water. Rinse and then put into a pot with enough water to cover the beans by 2 cm or so. Bring to the boil and simmer for an hour.

Chop the onions and garlic quite small. Chop tomatoes and potatoes into small cubes.
Heat the oil in a frying pan and add the onions and garlic. Cook until starting to soften. Add the spices and cook stirring for a minute. Add the tomatoes and then the potatoes, stirring well to coat everything.

Check the water level in the beans. It should just cover them. If there is too much water, remove the excess. Now add the contents of the frying pan to the beans, season with salt and pepper and cook for another hour, until the beans and potatoes are very tender. Check for seasoning. At this stage it can be left and reheated later.

Just before serving, add the lemon juice to taste. Don’t be tempted to leave this out, as it really lifts all the flavours to a new dimension and adds a lively touch.

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I’m taking part in the PicknPay Freshly Blogged SA bloggers competition, which started last Friday and will be carrying on for 11 weeks, with 5 people being eliminated each week and a grand finale cook-off for the last three in September. It’s a Masterchef mystery box style challenge where we are given set ingredients and have to come up with a recipe. I’ll be publishing my first recipe here very soon, which I’ve submitted to their site today. The deadline for our submissions is tomorrow and the Freshly Blogged site goes live on Monday, when you’ll be able to vote for your favourite recipe. (Hint - mine is delicious!)  It’s  been great fun, stimulating creative food thinking, so I hope to stay in for as many rounds as possible, and there’s plenty of worthy competition among all my fellow SA food bloggers!

Our list included Thai frozen vegetables, phyllo pastry, garlic, ginger and dhania paste, 2-minute noodles, a pineapple and an orange... we were allowed to omit one ingredient and add one ingredient of our choice... what would you have made?

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Our Winter Festival 2013

Fire, candlelight and warm winter spices wafting from mulled wine, lanterns and sparklers these are the elements of our winter festivals.

We started them to make an occasion for all those winter things that I missed when we moved here from England. In South Africa the celebration times are summer – Christmas, long holidays, braais, beaches. Bonfire night, lanterns, mulled wine and all those cheerful things that  add a dash of colour and brightness to the long dreary winter in England just don’t have a proper niche over here.

So we started with a bonfire and making of lanterns our very first midwinter on the farm and that is how our seasonal festivals began. That first year we built our bonfire down in front of the cottage, but first carried our lanterns on long poles to the sandpit, where we stuck the poles in the form of a circle right in the middle, which is how the circle began. Our children were still toddlers and needed help to balance the lanterns on the ends of their poles, but were thrilled to be outside in the dark on an adventure.

From then on the whole celebration took place in the sandpit; we added sparklers to the list of essentials, an avenue of brown bags with candles to make a pathway, an extra braai fire to cook sausages on. And in all the twelve winter festivals we’ve had, only on one occasion were we driven inside too soon by rain. All the rest have been blessed by a window of still, clear weather.

Saturday was no exception – Friday’s wind had blown itself out, a storm was forecast for Monday, but there we were with an almost-supermoon rising and taking on an absolutely brilliant wide corona in the hazy sky.

The girls had spent hours in the sandpit in the afternoon and came up with two fabulous ‘Winter’s sculpted out of sand, which they then lit with candles.

The sculpture the next morning, after a dog had added to the detailing

There was one deputation tidying up the circle and straightening out poles, which come adrift or get blown over in between times, a bag filling and positioning party, the men on bonfire building as they discussed matters of global importance.

Then the last two families arrived and there was a flurry of lantern-making, candle distributing, as the spices from the mulled wine pervaded the house with (to me) Christmassey smells.

There was also butternut soup, a mildly spiced ‘Persian’ bean soup (I’m waiting to share the recipe with you until I manage to take a half-decent photo of it, and there was no way I had time for food photography right then!), my plaited loaves, puddings hiding in the fridge until our return from the circle and a cooler of sausage and boeri to be cooked outside.

Candles were lit in lanterns and brown bags, food ferried down wrapped in towels to be ready, warm and waiting and then finally everyone was ready, our gaggle of older children still not too old to enjoy being outside in the darkness with fire and flame our only light, and the youngest members of the party at three and four keeping the excitement and wonder of it alive.

That wonderful moon with its glowing corona felt like the ultimate blessing on the celebration. We stayed our by the fire long after the mulled wine was dispatched, the soups and sausages eaten, only being drawn inside by the puddings when the fire had collapsed into a heap of hot embers.

For the first time we had a few little fireworks  - the Catherine wheel

The next morning, still clear and cold, the fire a heap of ashes with a faint plume of smoke from the last end of log, lanterns still bright and unfaded by rain.

And later in the afternoon, after a brunch that is more of a late lunch, energies fade further!

Two more winter festival posts if you'd like more pictures of lanterns and bonfires: our 2012 winter festival and winter festival 2011. And my mulled wine recipe if you're tempted to fill your home with spices aromas!

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Bracken the Kitten

All our animals make it onto the blog sooner or later and I’ve been admirably restrained in waiting six whole weeks before indulging in a flurry of cute kitten pics!

Bracken came into the family as a very appealing and fluffy little 6 week old.  Normally that would be a bit young to be taken away from his family but our vets had rescued a whole litter that were unwanted, they were already separated from their mother and needed homes quickly.

The children and I rushed in to town after school to have a look at the kittens and they spent almost an hour getting to know them and trying to decide on just one kitten, as I determinedly kept my heart hardened and resolute in the face of pleas to take home two or three.

Eventually they all agreed on the fluffy ginger one, who was playful and not too shy and was happy to be cuddled. For the first two nights he slept in the girls’ room, until we found that they were being woken several times in the night. Then we took him on for a couple of nights, feeling that he was still too little to be all on his own. After one particularly broken night, we banished him to the bathroom, where he was happy to curl up in the laundry basket all night and, as long as the lights were off, no more disturbances were forthcoming.

Our two older cats were not happy to make his acquaintance. Fluff hissing like a pot boiling over on a hot fire, Socks ignoring him totally.

Fluff is a scary, grumpy old man

The poor little me look after meeting Fluff

So Bracken resorted to playing with the dogs and now chases Amy the Jack Russell all over the place. He’s fascinated by the ducks, who also seem curious about him and gather round him when he’s out exploring.

Dogs, I can handle

Devoted acolytes grooming for fleas

They even made me a pompom!

Now of course he has grown tremendously, into a lanky twelve week old and is climbing trees and falling out of them, stealing the older cats’ food, pouncing on their tails and getting into mischief. But he still curls up under our chins when we sit on the sofa and purrs like a motorboat, so therapeutic in times of stress. A purring kitten has to be top of the list when it comes to relaxation aids!

When the kids are at school he 'helps' my husband or I by sitting curled against us purring away, between our hands and the keyboard, so that we automatically de-stress as we work. Or else he tries to help us do the work itself, which is less successful!

Exploring the stoep in the winter sunshine

Catch that tail! Socks having his siesta interrupted.

He’s brought much joy and life to the farm, much needed when we’ve lost both Horror and Badger this year, as well as Toffee the rabbit, and the aunts have also lost one dog each. They are dutifully doting aunts to Bracken, instigating searches of the whole house when he’s not to be seen during their evening visits and being terribly anxious about his well-being whenever we are out for the evening!

Now Fluff is mostly tolerating him, unless he is especially annoying, and Socks has been known to play with him once or twice. And that crazy fur still looks like he's had an electric shock, whenever you see him back-lit!

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Salt

 “He’s the salt of the earth” 

Salt has been the most essential addition to our food for thousands of years. It was valued and, in some eras, so prized that it attracted heavy taxes, making it too expensive for the common man to use every day, which is why even today, when the salt tax is long gone, much of Italy still bakes its bread unsalted, having acquired a taste for it more than a hundred years ago.  Salt has always been so much a part of our food heritage that it is a little strange that it has become today’s scapegoat of the food world. Fat is back, butter is once more safe to eat (did you ever switch to marg? I certainly didn’t!) but salt is now the demon.

The biggest part of the problem lies with packaged and processed foods and a fast-food culture that relies too heavily on them. Salt is a fantastic preservative, so tends to be used quite heavily in complex foods with a long shelf life.  It’s all too easy to eat too much salt and that can result in health problems such as heart disease and high blood pressure. Another problem is that our taste sensors build up a tolerance to salt, so that if we get used to the taste of a certain amount, any less tastes bland. We end up adding more salt to our food than is good for us. But ruling out salt altogether isn't the answer. Our bodies need salt to function properly, ultra low sodium diets can cause health problems just as much as  diets too high in sodium.

I think I add just the right amount of salt to my cooking. I add to my own taste levels...  my husband’s taste buds are differently calibred and he tends to add salt at the table. I’ve noticed that the children are following suit, our son in particular being a little too lavish with the adding, so when I got an email from Nestle mentioning a Salt Awareness week and offering to send me the ingredients and their recipe for a low salt but tasty meal I thought this would be a good thing to try out.

Expecting some new low-salt products and seasonings, I was a little taken aback when their box was delivered to find packs of stew granules, Worcestershire sauce and 2-minute noodles alongside some flavoured evaporated milk cook-in sauces. It was as if the person packing the boxes hadn’t got the memo that this was a low-salt challenge. The ingredients list on the stew granules was headed up by salt, which didn’t give me much confidence in its health credentials. However it did result in my salt awareness jacking up a notch, as I dug out the magnifying glass, scrutinised the labels and started doing calculations in my head for daily salt allowances. 

The recommended upper limit of sodium per adult per day is 2300mg, equivalent to one teaspoon of salt.

The stew granules had 4600mg of sodium in a 30g packet, intended to go in a recipe to feed four, so basically that is half your entire daily salt allowance used up in one dish. These were intended for the butternut and lentil bobotie recipe, so I gave that one a miss and went for the beef stroganoff, which actually only had two packaged ingredients, the Worcestershire sauce and the mushroom flavoured evaporated milk, both of which were fairly reasonable in salt content.  The cook-in milk came in at 140mg per 100ml serving which puts it just into the official low-salt category and the Worcestershire sauce has 119mg per 10 ml serving.  For the recipe provided this added up to 707mg of sodium in total, giving about 176mg per person if no extra salt is added, which is much more reasonable. To give Nestle their due they had also sent a voucher to purchase the fresh ingredients for the recipe, so I had some lovely beef fillet, red peppers and mushrooms and parsley lined up on the counter.

However, at this point I started to have a logic problem with this exercise.  Normally when cooking a recipe like this from scratch with fresh ingredients I would probably only use about 1/3 teaspoon of salt anyway. A little seasoning in the flour dusted on the meat, a couple of twists of the mill over the whole dish as it cooks and a quick check at the end to correct the seasoning to taste... to my taste that is!

“Take it with a pinch of salt”

And I have to confess to being a food snob when it comes to packaged sauces, so I was already having doubts about smothering luscious fillet steak and fresh peppers and mushrooms with something out of a tin. Why use a ‘mushroom flavoured’ sauce (containing no real mushrooms) in a dish that already has mushrooms in? I tried to stick with the recipe, I really did try, but I just couldn’t bring myself to pour the stuff on. This was supposed to be our family supper after all. I decided to split the dish at the point when the sauce was added and try one part with the cook-in sauce and one part with sour cream, as is more traditional. The two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce in the recipe seemed outrageously overpowering to me, so I reduced the amount considerably.

I went ahead and cooked the meal and we all enjoyed the treat of tender fillet steak strips, but I have to admit that the dish as a whole was a compromise. The cook-in sauce version, I imagine, would have tasted fine to those who like to use packets of mushroom flavoured soup in their recipes, but needed the whole amount of Worcestershire sauce to give it enough salt, which would have completely overwhelmed the rest of the spices and the meat itself. The version where I used cream instead of the sauce ended up being bland because I hadn’t added any real salt during cooking and there wasn’t the salt from the cook-in sauce to compensate. I would have been far better off from a low salt point of view just cooking from scratch with only fresh ingredients and using judicious pinches of natural seasalt as I usually do.

So as a salt awareness exercise it was in a way a success – it made me think, scan labels more critically, and it made me even more determined to cook from fresh, use salt wisely and in moderation.  However as a taste test it failed completely. It did nothing to make me want to buy or recommend any of the products ever and I still can’t understand why 2-minute noodles and very salty stew granules made it into a press pack for food bloggers for a salt awareness week. No food blogger worth their salt is going to be thrilled with receiving these products. I’m feeling more than ever cynical about big brands disguising  (not very subtly) a product promotion as a health drive . The best thing they could do for everyone's health is take 2-minute noodles and stew granules off the supermarket shelves altogether.

Three salts in my kitchen: KhoiSan sea salt, Khoisan seaweed salt, FalkSalt seasalt flakes with chilli

If you want some more facts about salt here’s a 2009 report on salt usage from Harvard.

And my salt aware path forward?
Continue to cook with fresh foods, avoid processed foods even more and check labels, check labels, check labels!
Use a good unrefined sea salt. When I switched to using KhoiSan salt from regular table salt several years ago, I found that I needed far less salt to get the same intensity of flavour. Plus there are no artificial additives and chemicals so it’s healthier in every way... as long as you use it in moderation of course!

What are your feelings on salt? Do you have a favourite cooking salt in your kitchen?

Natural sea salt crystals like jewels

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