How did yours turn out?I made these when I was a Jackolyte and they were awful. I am going to find a different recipe and try them again.
They are definitely more crunchy than flaky 🫤This makes me sad, a properly made Lardy cake is an unctuous, flaky decadent treat.
Paul Hollywood is a smug git, but this recipe of his is a good'unI made these when I was a Jackolyte and they were awful. I am going to find a different recipe and try them again.
Is that you thumberlina Peapod? Masquerading as-a Frau? There’s a bit missing:It’s slop o’clock, slop fans!
Today I’m baking Lardy Buns, which just so happens to be my new pet name for myself. I’ve gone with the recipe from Cooking On A Bootstrap which favours plain flour and yeast, as opposed to variations online where she unfathomably uses both self raising AND yeast. I want this recipe to actually work so I’m going for what appears to be the more sensible version.
View attachment 1740894
I had everything except the lard which was 41pShe starts off by blooming her yeast in warm water before adding it to the ingredients. Seems a bit of an arse about tit way of doing it. Why not just add it to the dry ingredients and then add the warm water to the bowl like you would in any other recipe? Unnecessary faffing.
View attachment 1740911
Made my well which she explains is a “sort of hole”. So helpful. So forensic.
View attachment 1740913
Then I added the yeast water, butter and lard. So, so much lard. And the rest of the water to get a dough.
View attachment 1740921
It did smell nice and cinamonny at this point but I honestly can’t emphasis how much of this mass is just pure lard. I did some kneading and the dough came together nice and easily. Felt springy, as she described. At this stage, it’s all quite orokising
View attachment 1741085
Back in the bowl and left to prove, covered over and left somewhere warm. The instructions are much better than the woeful proving instructions that went with the horrendous courgette bread.
Here it is before proving. View attachment 1741088
And after - she says to leave it for an hour or until doubled in size. It probably took
View attachment 1741093
Then it’s time to form the buns by rolling the dough out, cutting into strips and rolling up.
View attachment 1741098
View attachment 1741099
The recipe is meant to make six buns but as you can see, I got a couple of wee ones too. She then says you can brush with egg if you want. I am a fancy gal so I did some brushing and it’s just as well, because the next instruction is to sprinkle with sugar and without the egg wash, I can’t see how the sugar would cost the buns. They aren’t particularly sticky to touch.
View attachment 1741108
View attachment 1741109The recipe calls for 50g of sugar - this is so much sugar to sprinkle on this many buns, but what do I know?
View attachment 1741112So much sugar.
Into the oven they go
Some early investigations revealed they were quite underdone in the middle so I stuck them back in for a bit. The resulting buns are a bit overdone on the outside but at least the lardy innards are cooked through.
View attachment 1741208
taste test to follow…
It was quite strange, soggy on the outside and al dente in the middle. Tbh after 40 minutes of sitting in cooling water I think it had disolved rather than cooked.@FrumpyCat your OH is a very wise man.
I'm actually surprised that the pasta cooked at all. I would have thought the water would cool too quickly to soften the pasta, even with multiple glogs of hot water from the kettle.
Well, no wonder your pasta didn't cook! If you added that Silica gel packet in the bottom right corner to the pasta mug, it would have sucked up all the hot water! Silly @FrumpyCat !Jack said you could add anything, so I gathered all the sachets I could find, including one marked 'do not eat'.
DearRoll up your sleeves and get slopping, ninnies. The Jaffa cake Mug Pudding has slopped its way into my microwave.
5/5 All things I had in except the marmalade. But marmalade is hardly a weird ingredient so can't fault her on that.
View attachment 1738124
3/5 The recipe was pretty straightforward to follow. No mug size suggested so I just went with a regular mug. Possibly a bit on the small side, but no info given. I melted the chocolate spread and marmalade. Before shot (Trigger warning for Iqbal. Sorry if you're reading, Iqbal)
View attachment 1738132
Melted it all together, stirred in what seemed like A LOT of oil, then milk, egg, sugar and flour.
View attachment 1738136
(I mean, it's not the Groucho Club)
The flour was quite difficult to mix properly in such a small space.
View media item 3482Jack suggested that the cake/pudding would rise and then deflate. I decided to put a plate under it just in case, which Jack hadn't suggested. She also included no fire safety tips whatsoever so I figured it would be fine to put the mug in the microwave with a fork in.
View attachment 1738168
JK, don't try this at home, kids.
The plate turned out to be very much needed.
View media item 3480I was then instructed to add an extra "smudge" of chocolate spread and marmalade to the top of the towering pud.
View attachment 1738173
And back in the microwave it went for its final 30 seconds.
View media item 3479Watch out! It's becoming sentient!
2/5 I mean I've seen prettier things. Jack suggests the option of adding chocolate sauce to finish, which I had on hand, but there was no way anything else was going to fit in that mug when the chocolate spread and marmalade were already making a break for it so I abandoned the chocolate sauce.
View attachment 1738188
1/5 Stodge. With sloppy edges. Kinda claggy mouthfeel afterwards. I didn't expect it to be this firm. But it was also sludgy.(Volume up for this one!)
View media item 3481
3/5 I will give it to her, this is definitely reminiscent of Jaffa cakes, flavour wise. However, the more cooked bits in the middle had a definite eggy undertone and there was a bitter aftertaste (which may be the marmalade?)
It didn't taste bad and I confess I scarfed the entire thing because, um, it was chocolate. And then I felt a little sick. It was still sloppy/uncooked around the edges (I tasted the sloppy bits on their own to check they weren't just melted chocolate spread) and then very stodgy in the middle. It overflowed the mug and tbh just wasn't worth the labour intensity. I'd rather make a batch of brownies and delay my gratification by 30 mins.
I think it'll have to be a 2. Sorry(not sorry) Jack.
Jack, people have been putting courgettes in cake since for ever. You just have to look at any Womens' Institute cookbook to go "ah, these ladies really grasp the concept of (1) a glut and (2) children who are deeply suspicious of anything green." Just because you only became aware of it last week doesn't mean it's new, it just means you don't know anything.Just posting some more book recipes for the wiki table.
Dear heart, I am not Forensic nor am I a good cook, but your 2nd thermometer reading was 68 but in your post you mentioned pork had to be 75, is it safe to eat? Have I misunderstood?(Apologies, my angels, my previous post on this had to be deleted due to the worst formatting issues known to man, thank you to the kind mods for removing it and sparing my blushes)
Sausage and BeanCassouletStew.
First off, I refuse to call this recipe a Cassoulet. It's a stew, just call it a stew. A cassoulet uses a staggering variety of meats, almost always involving sausage, duck confit, chicken legs, fatty pork/salt pork and pork skin, and the beans are some kind of large, firm ones that will hold their shape even after hours of cooking. And it is cooked in the oven for a long, long period of time so that it forms a crust on top (modern varients use breadcrumb to achieve this).
If you gave this to a Frenchman and called it a cassoulet he'd be singing the Marseillaise and dusting off the guillotine before you could say "rinse yer baked beans".
The French are a wonderful people, aren't they?
View attachment 1743789
- Splash of oil £0.04
- 8 sausages £6.89 (gluten-free from a trusted butchers, I ain't eating Unknown Frozen Pig Product from ASDA, sorry gang, call me a snob if you want, but I can't
- 1 carrot £0.07
- 1 onion £0.33
- 2 cloves garlic £0.40
- 100g chopped bacon (Tesco Finest Back Bacon, UK reared), reduced section, £0.50, what a bargain!
- handful of fresh herbs (parsley, rosemary, thyme, whatever) £0.50
- zest and juice of 1 lemon, or 1 tsp of lemon juice (these two things do not seem equivalent in the slightest) £0.09
- 1 chicken stock cube (gluten free) in 400ml boiling water £0.15
- 200g (1/2 can) chopped tomatoes £0.23
- 1x 400g tin of haricot beans, or rinsed baked beans £0.70
Total 10.15, serves 4, so £2.58 per portion. It would be a great deal less if you bought cheap sausages, but I got a *real* good deal on the bacon, so swings and roundabouts, eh?
Mise en place done, I begin with cooking my sausages. These are good sausages. I feel worried for them.
The recipe says to take them out, let them cool and chop them up. I do not do this, because heating & cooling minced pork repeatedly is only for people who do not believe in e-coli.
In goes the carrot, onion, garlic, bacon. No mention of pepper. I am baffled.
In goes the parsley and the miserable spot of lemon juice. I feel dried mixed herbs and a good glug of red wine vinegar would be nicer, as well as cheaper in the long run, as a little goes a long way and they keep well, but hey-ho.
In goes (far too much) stock and (far too little) canned tomato. It is heated for a mere 15 minutes, then the beans are plonked in right at the end and it is heated for 3 minutes. Jack says this will slightly reduce the sauce. Slightly being the operative word.
View attachment 1743791
The result:
View attachment 1743793
Thoughts
- It's perfectly edible, and with a side of potato would quite nice, and very filling. But Jack. Jack, babes. Pepper is cheap. Cornflour/flour as a thickener is cheap. Salt and sugar are cheap. Mixed herbs are cheap. Hell, a full can of chopped tomatoes is cheap, half a can for 4 people is madness.
- It's not cooked for long enough. Simple fact. It's not a tasty stew, it's items suspended in a liquid that would have become a stew, had you cooked it for 45 minutes longer
- The sauce is miserably watery and the predominent flavour is salt from the stock and the bacon. Even just bunging in baked beans in their sauce would have worked better, you could have got a bit of sugar and starch that would have softened the acidity and harshness of the other ingredients, and thickened the stewing liquid up a little
- The sausages are good, but that's because I bought very good sausage, from happy free-range piggies. God knows what this would be like with bargain sausages that are mostly filler and sadness
Massive Honking Safety Concerns I am not putting in a spoiler because it's important:
Jack says to cook the sausages, then let them cool and chop them up, then reheat them in the stew. At the end she says you can reheat the leftovers the next day with pasta, so that's 3 cycles of heating /cooling. Better to not bother cooling the sausages in order to cut them, or just not cut them at all, and make sure they're cooked through before serving.
While you can reheat leftovers a couple of times, I would be very wary of eating sausage meat that has been heated then cooled, then heated then cooled and then reheated once more. It puts it in the temperature danger zone for bacterial growth at least three times over, and that's not something I want to risk, especially with minced meat that has a higher chance of baterial contamination in the first place.
(Confession time: I live less than 5 miles from Wishaw, home to the deadliest outbreak of e coli in the modern age. 21 people died in 1996 because a butcher didn't store meat correctly. I have very strong opinions about this sort of thing, and so do most people here who lived through that dreadful event.)
Conclusion
Overall 2.5/5
Ingredients: 4/5 These are all genuinely excellent ingredients. But a spoonful of cornflour, some pepper/fennel/mixed herbs, the full can of tomatoes and a good glug of red wine vinegar would have pepped it up significantly, and barely added anything to the price
Taste/Texture: 2.5/5. It was perfectly edible, just a little undercooked and watery.
Visual Appeal: 2/5 Stew never looks very pretty. This was...not a very pretty stew even by stew standards.
Cost: 2/5. This is kind of pricey, mainly because of the snausage, that's on me. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Recipe: 2/5. It's not a cassoulet, it's a stew, stop trying to sound fancy, Jack. Also, it would have been 3/5 because the sausages were browned nicely, the onions, carrots, garlic got sauted correctly...but those instructions regarding the heating/cooling of pork gave me the horrors.
But wait, there's more! Energy SavingCassouletStew
So, I made my dish, and it was average. But in my reading of Jacks' recipes I noticed a funny old thing. For in the Guardian newspaper in 2015 Jack wrote the following recipe:
Jack Monroe’s energy-saving cassoulet – recipe
Slow-cooked dishes don’t need to sit on the hob or in the oven for hours. After a short blast of heat, they can be tightly wrapped in a towel and left to carry on cooking at no costwww.theguardian.com
And it's pretty much the exact same recipe as the Sausage and BeansCassouletStew, save for the fact that the following ingredients are also added
And after being cooked on the hob, it is placed for 3 hours in an oven, or wrapped tightly in a towel/dressing gown and placed in a box for 3 hours. The towel/dressing gown will conserve the heat, allowing your cassoulet to carry on cooking at no extra cost, Jack says.
- 1 tsp fennel seeds
- 3 stalks rosemary, or 1 tbsp mixed dried herbs
- 2 tbsp red wine vinegar or cider vinegar
- 2 slices white bread, grated into breadcrumbs (except I didn't have non-gluten free bread and my fellow taste-tester is celiac, so I made a slurry of cornflour/water and added that as a thickener instead)
Well. Darlings. I had to give it a shot, didn't I?
I had to wait for 3 hours, so I then did my housework and some yoga and felt very virtuous. Then I slumped on the sofa and ate some chocolate buttons whilst watching terrible Channel 5 Christmas movies and felt less virtuous.To the base stew (as detailed in my post above) which was still on the hob, I added the extra herbs and the red wine vinegar. It was very exciting to be adding extra herbs to the dish, I found myself growing quite jolly as I prepared my Dressing Gown Cooking Box as follows, with a blanket, a towel and my trusty Primark dressing gown.
View attachment 1743799
It does look very safe and hygenic, doesn't it?
At this point I whipped out my trusty digital thermometer (so useful if you are a paranoid wreck about cooking temperatures like me) and measured the temp. According the UK Food Standards Agency pork needs to reach an internal temperature of 75 C for 2 minutes, to kill off any harmful bugs. My pork was very comfortably above that at 84C:
View attachment 1743802
Into the Dressing Gown Cooking Box! Night night, little stew! Sleep tight, don't let the bed-bugs bite!
View attachment 1743804
I put the lid on too, to give it the best possible insulation and chance of cooking.
View attachment 1743805
And then, it was time!
I took it out of the Dressing Gown Cooking Box, and the casserole dish was still very toasty warm. The cooking thermometer gave a very respectable temperature too! I am genuinely amazed at how well this thing held the heat!
View attachment 1743809
And this is how it looks:
View attachment 1743810
And gang, I think I have found the Holy Grail, the thing we thought we'd never find. This recipe, this weird, baffling, Dressing Gown Cooking Box Sausage And Bean Energy SavingCassouletStew..is really nice.
The extra few ingredients and time spent snug in a well insulated box has worked magic. The tomatoes have become sweeter and have cooked down, the vegetables are soft and blended into the savoury sauce, the beans and cornflour (or breadcrumb if you so wish) have thickened the stew up nicely. And the snausage and beans are good. Maybe a little overcooked and prone to disintegration now, I think this is a recipe that would work better for a tougher and fattier meat like pork belly/shoulder, and some bigger, hardier beans (butterbeans, maybe). But still acceptable.
I fed it to my sister, who had been regarding the Dressing Gown Cooking Box with slight horror, and she confirmed it was perfectly acceptable and something she would not hesitate to make...except she would do it in her slow cooker/oven, because she's not a lunatic who would spend a whole afternoon doing weird stuff for internet points and to win an imaginary war against some minor celebrity chef who nobody really cares about.
Also, she felt it needed pepper. My sister is right 50% of the time.Ingredients: 4.5/5. The addition of the extra herbs, wine and the breadcrumb/cornflour as a thickener is a great improvement. Half point removed for no mention of pepper. It needed pepper, my sister was right on that point.
Taste/Texture: 4/5. It was tasty! it was savoury and meaty and the herbs were nice. It was a little bit gloppy, and the sausage and beans were definitely overcooked, but still good. We had it with mashed potato and green beans and were extremely full and happy afterwards
Visual Appeal: 3.5/5 It's a nicer looking stew now, I must admit. Not beautiful, but okay.
Recipe: I am conflicted, gang! The recipe worked, and yet...Dressing Gown Cooking Box. It's just...weird. And a little confusing, and now I have to wash my dressing gown because it got garlic on it.
Jack does say you can put it in a low oven instead, and I think that would appeal more to normal people who don't spend a whole afternoon doing weird stuff for internet points. Also, the breadcrumbs would go all crispy on top via that method if you took the lid off for the last 1/2 hour of cooking in an oven, and that would probably be very tasty indeed.
Overall: 4/5. My shock, you could use it to move mountains.
Nope, I should have been clearer in the post. The pork has to be heated up to at least 75C to be safe, and it reached that on the hob, it was at 84C for at least 10 minutes.Dear heart, I am not Forensic nor am I a good cook, but your 2nd thermometer reading was 68 but in your post you mentioned pork had to be 75, is it safe to eat? Have I misunderstood?
They were very solid. Like bricksHow did yours turn out?
They are definitely more crunchy than flaky 🫤
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?