Smoked Trout – so simple, so tasty, and all home-made

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Kate Watson

Smoked trout – like its close cousin smoked salmon – is one of the great ‘luxury’ foods. I find I prefer it – the finished product, while it looks very similar to salmon, has a more delicate flavour with less of the aggressively-fishy oiliness which can characterise smoked salmon. It’s much less readily available, too – and can certainly be expensive, a quick google suggests prices from £40 – £80 a kilo direct from a number of British producers. Expect further mark-up in a smart London delicatessen!

Of course, if I were just writing this in praise of smoked trout and telling you to go and buy some from a smokehouse on the internet, it wouldn’t be the country skills blog! Making smoked trout at home is straightforward, and produces a first-class product which is the match of anything you’ll buy from even the most up-market smokehouse or deli counter. Better still, it costs a fraction of the commercial product. The two fillets of rainbow trout I cured and smoked for this post cost the princely sum of £1.53, with a combined final weight of a little over 200g – including other ingredients and consumables, that’s a total cost of well below £10/kg. A little luxury, then, that we can all afford to enjoy a bit more often!

You’re going to be eating this fish raw, effectively, so freshness is of the essence. Choose a lovely fresh whole trout – with bright clear eyes, red gills and no ‘fishy’ smell – and have it descaled and filleted for you by the fishmonger (or do it yourself – it’s not that tricky really!). Good quality farmed trout is readily available, even on supermarket fish counters, and if you can get hold of a lovely fresh wild fish, even better! Avoid pre-packed fillets, whose freshness it is more difficult to be certain of. Wash the fillets off carefully under the tap, to remove all the mucus coating from the skin. Make sure you’ve removed all the rib bones and pin-bones (the small pointy bones that run along the middle of the fillet) – a pair of tweezers is very useful here. This will take a few minutes, but is worth the effort to do properly. Then rinse the fillets and dry them carefully with kitchen towel. Weigh the fillets and make a note of this weight.

The cure I use for trout and salmon is very simple – made up of 1/3rd sugar (golden caster sugar is my favourite here) and 2/3rd table salt. I favour a short curing time – just overnight – with an excess of dry-cure so that the cure stays saturated throughout. Be generous – you can afford to be, since the ingredient cost is very low – in the scale of pence for a couple of fillets.

You want a thin layer of cure in your non-metallic dish below the fish, and a good coating over the top. The photo gives a good idea of the sort of coating you’re aiming for.

You then want to weigh down the fillets to help draw water out – you’ll need to improvise something – I found a couple of plastic ‘take-away’ containers fitted very nicely in my dish, and then weighed them down with tin cans. Don’t use anything metallic in direct contact with the curing fish. Put the salted fillets in the fridge.

I would tend to get the cure going when I get home from work, having collected my fresh fish on the way home – so just before bed I turn the fillets over in the cure, and replace the weights before putting them back in the refrigerator. The next morning, there will be quite a lot of liquid in the dish and most of the cure will have dissolved. Take the fillets out of the dish, noting the change in texture – the skin will have taken on a harder, almost cardboard character, and the flesh will be firmer and more translucent. Rinse and dry the fillets, and weigh them again, and note down the reduction in weight. My fillets had dropped from a starting weight of 256g to 220g at this stage – a 14% water loss. You’re aiming for a final loss of ~18% by the end of the process, so that’s well on target. Now place the fillets on an open plate, uncovered, in the refrigerator for 24 hours before cold smoking.

You may have read this far, and are now thinking ‘well, that’s no use to me – who has a cold smoker at home?!’. At it’s simplest, cold smoking requires two things – a source of cold smoke (from smouldering sawdust, for instance), and a space in which to contain it. Last year, I built a wooden tower smoker, but there’s no need to start with a construction project. A cardboard box, or a (clean!) upturned bin or barrel, rigged up creatively with a rack or two, will do just as well for the occasional smoking job!

You will need a smoke source, and I can heartily recommend the ProQ Cold Smoke Generator, which is a nifty little gadget which entirely takes any stress or complication out of the process. It’s a little pricey (around £35 at this time), but will pay for itself incredibly quickly once you get the smoking bug! It reliably provides 10 – 12 hours of cold smoke (depending on the temperature, humidity, and your sawdust choice) with very little heat production. Have a look at the Supplier’s List for suggested sources of smoking and curing supplies.

Choose a day without too much wind or rain (the occasional shower isn’t important), and where the temperature is roughly between 5 degrees and 15 degrees centigrade. I’ve successfully smoked between 0 and 5 degrees but smoke penetration is less effective. Colder, and your fish will freeze rather than taking smoke. Warmer and the risk of spoilage increases considerably – though cold smoking temperatures up to about 20 degrees are cited in some places. Get the smoker going first thing in the morning, and leave it for the day – though I would keep it under much closer supervision if using a cardboard box!.

I used a mix of alder and maple sawdust for this smoker burn (about 10% maple) – this produced a gorgeous neutral smoke-flavour with very little bitterness and with a noticeable ‘sweet’ note, presumably from the maple. It’s definitely a mix I’ll use again in the future.

Once the smoke generator has burned all the way through, unload your smoker, and take a final weight on your fillets. They should have lost another 4 – 5 %. They will have a lovely orange-pink colour with a noticeable translucency and a glossy surface. Then wrap them tightly in cling film, and freeze them. Smoking fish in this way isn’t really a preserving mechanism, and storage time in the fridge is about 3 – 4 days. Even if I’m going to eat them very soon, though, I tend to freeze them at this stage – a day or two in the freezer should ensure any parasites which may be present in the fish have been killed off. You can keep them frozen for a couple of weeks without too much loss of quality, but after a month or so you’ll start to notice the deterioration.

Once thawed, I slice the smoked trout thinly with a sharp knife, starting at the ‘head’ end of the fillet, at about a 45 degree angle. There’s a bit of a knack to this, but you’ll get good at it really quickly – and who cares if the slices are thicker, or a bit uneven? This produces small, almost translucent slices which are great for nibbles. I love to serve these with water biscuits or oatcakes (or your preferred sort of cracker), cream cheese – or a soft goat’s cheese is also very nice, freshly ground black pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. But the limit is really your imagination. Smoked trout with scrambled eggs on a toasted muffin is a beautifully indulgent breakfast!

I really do hope you chose to give home-smoked trout a try, and that however you prepare and enjoy it, it brings you as much foodie pleasure as it brings me!

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Better than Branded – homemade sun-dried tomato ketchup

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Kate Watson

It’s too early in the year to have a glut of tomatoes, but I wanted to try my hand at home-made tomato ketchup. The commercial offering is so ubiquitous, how many of us pause to think what’s in it, or if we could make it better ourselves? I wondered if using sun-dried tomatoes, the dry-packed sort, might give me a shortcut to a sauce that would pack a real concentrated tomato punch. Well, they do – with the added bonus of not requiring the extended cooking time required to drive excess water off fresh tomatoes.

To make a little over a litre of sun dried tomato ketchup, you will require the following –

250g of dry-packed sun dried tomatoes
Two small to medium sized yellow onions
5 cloves of garlic
Whole red chilli
Red wine vinegar
Balsamic vinegar
Fresh ginger
Soft brown sugar
Ground allspice
A carton of apple juice
Food processor, ideally with blender attachment, or hand-held liquidiser

Put the tomatoes in a bowl and pour over enough freshly boiled water to cover. Roughly chop the onions (or peel, quarter, and chop in the food processor). Mince the garlic. Once the tomatoes have been soaking for about half an hour, pour off – but reserve! – the soaking liquid. Roughly chop the tomatoes by hand or put them through the food processor. Also finely chop the whole chilli (it can go through the machine with the tomatoes).

Now put a glug of olive oil (or your preferred cooking oil) in the bottom of a large pan, and then start to fry off the onions, adding the garlic when the onion has gone translucent, but not taken on any colour. Fry until just colouring and then add the chopped tomatoes & chilli, mix together and add the tomato-soaking liquid back in. This liquid will have taken on some lovely flavour from the tomatoes (which is why we’re using it). Note however that dry-packed tomatoes are preserved with salt, so if reducing the amount of salt in your diet is important to you, you should discard this liquid and instead add enough apple juice to allow you to start to stew the tomatoes.

At this stage, the whole process becomes a matter of personal taste. I added about a cm of fresh grated ginger to the pot, along with a quarter of a teaspoon of allspice. I started by adding 50ml of red wine vinegar, a glug of balsamic vinegar, and a tablespoon of soft dark brown sugar. Keep tasting the mix as it cooks, and adjust your seasoning as required.

Once it’s been bubbling away for about twenty minutes, pour the contents of the pan into your blender, or take the pan off the hob and use your handheld blender. Start to liquidise the mix, adding apple juice as you go until you achieve your desired consistency. I stopped short of blending mine completely smooth, because I like it to have a little texture – a sort of hybrid ketchup/salsa feeling. I ended up adding about half a litre of apple juice in total.

Now return your mix to the hob and set it bubbling again. This is the time to make the final adjustments to your flavours. I ended up adding an extra splash of wine vinegar at this stage, along with another half tablespoon of sugar. Remember that you’re tasting the ketchup hot, once it’s cold, most flavours, but particularly vinegar flavours, will be less marked, so if a really sharp vinegar is to your taste, make sure you dial it in now!

Once it’s cooked and seasoned to your satisfaction, pack your ketchup into sterilised jars or bottles while still piping hot, and seal tightly. Old glass salad dressing bottles are great (and will have plasticised lids, which will help protect the metal from the vinegar). I would expect this to keep similarly to chutney, and to have a shelf life of several months in a cool dark place. Keep it in the fridge once opened and eat up reasonably quickly!

Try it – it’s gorgeous, sharp and sweet and packed with concentrated tomato flavour. I tasted it alongside commercial ketchup today and it makes the branded stuff taste like red acidic sugar water. It will make a great burger relish, and goes beautifully with oven baked spicy potato wedges.

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What’s Your Beef? Beth’s wonderful home-cured salt beef

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Kate Watson

Salt beef is quite a rarity these days. I’m aware our American cousins (to whom it’s corned beef) think of it as an Irish thing and eat it with cabbage at St Patrick’s the way we eat haggis, neeps and tatties on Burns Night. Despite having Irish heritage, I’ve never eaten salt beef, in this context or any other (honestly, Irish-American folks, that’s one tradition you’ve made up all for yourselves!). But I was very excited to experiment with the idea when I saw a lovely rolled brisket of beef at our local farm butcher’s shop.

A bit of asking around family brought me the information that my sister-in-law, Beth, and her family, were keen salt beef curers and consumers. She kindly shared her recipe & process with me, which I’ve adapted slightly to suit my purposes.

You will require the following to salt your beef –

Piece of rolled beef brisket, mine was about 1kg, which was about right for a meal for two plus cold cuts, or would have served four for dinner. You may need to find a real butcher’s shop, since brisket, despite being great value, is rather unfashionable and rarely available in the supermarket.
Curing salt (I used supracure, which is the pre-mixed salt-and-saltpetre mix I use for making bacon). Alternately you can use plain salt with (or without) added saltpetre. You won’t get quite the same flavour without the saltpetre, and the beef will be grey rather than the characteristic dark pink colour of salt beef.
Dark sugar, whatever sort you prefer
Whole peppercorns, juniper berries, cloves, bay leaves (dry or fresh), and a few sprigs of fresh thyme. Or experiment with any other herbs / spices you think might work well!
A non-metallic bowl big enough to completely submerge your beef in
Large saucepan, kitchen scales & measuring jug

Once you’ve gathered all your tools and ingredients together, you need to make your brine. First, work out how much brine you need. Put your beef in the bowl and cover it completely with water. Then take the beef out, and measure the water. That’s your target volume.

Now, for each litre of brine you require, weigh out the following into the saucepan –

300g of supracure
100g of dark sugar
Approximately 10 peppercorns, 6 juniper berries
A bay leaf, a clove, and a sprig of thyme (or whatever herbs and spices you fancy!)

Add the required volume of water (the more observant among you will notice that you’re going to end up with slightly more brine than you actually wanted, due to adding the dry ingredients – this is fine, don’t worry!) and heat to dissolve all the dry ingredients. Boil the brine briskly for a few minutes, and then allow to cool (refrigerate once it’s at room temperature to get it down to about 5 degrees centigrade).

Once the brine is cold, add your beef. Weigh it down with a small plate or saucer if required to keep it fully submerged. This is quite a ‘hard’ (concentrated) brine and the beef will tend to want to float up in it. Now put the bowl of brine & beef in the fridge, and apart from turning the beef over in the cure once a day, if you remember to, leave it alone. My 1kg piece of beef was in the brine for 5 days. You’ll want a longer curing time for larger pieces of beef, perhaps up to 10 days or so.

After your curing time has elapsed, take your beef out of the brine. It will have become considerably denser and firmer in texture (surprisingly so, in fact), as well as darker in colour.

The alchemy that is salt-curing has happened now, so you’re going to want to soak the salt beef for 24 hours to reduce the saltiness of the finished product a bit. Wash off the beef and submerge it in clean tap water (it will sink, so you don’t need to weigh it down this time) and return it to the fridge. Change the water at least once during the 24 hours.

Now, either cook it straight away, or remove from the soaking water, and return, covered, to the fridge for a day or two until you plan to prepare it.

I prepared my salt beef in the simplest way, by poaching it gently. Add a quartered onion, a handful of roughly chopped carrots, a bay leaf and some peppercorns to the saucepan, and cover the beef with water. You could also add some celery, but I don’t particularly like it.

Bring to the boil and then simmer, covered, very gently for two and a half hours (longer for larger pieces), until it yields easily to a fork. Then remove it from the poaching water and rest for half an hour, covered with foil. The water you’ve poached the beef in will now look like a rich beef broth.

After resting, slice your beef thickly (it’ll fall apart if you try to slice it too thinly) and serve with your choice of side dishes. Potatoes and cabbage appeared to be traditional (at least in some circles!) so I opted for boiled new potatoes and wilted spring greens, served with a white sauce made from a roux, some of the poaching liquor, a glug of cream and a big spoon of hot horseradish.

It was beautiful, though I say so myself. The beef, served hot, is incredibly tender and succulent. Cooled and sliced, the rest of the salt beef is also beautiful and will make cracking sandwiches. It’s firm and dense, slices nicely, and has a lovely gentle aromatic flavour. Home-cured salt beef is sure to become a regular culinary feature in our household. If any of you have favourite ways of preparing or serving salt beef, I’d love to hear them. Finally, thank you so much to Beth for her recipe and guidance, and I hope you all consider giving salt beef a try some time!

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Bacon Basics – bacon-in-a-bag method for ‘dry’ curing at home

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Kate Watson

Readers (& participants) in the Big Bacon Challenge will have noticed how little effort is involved in making dry cured bacon at home. While I was teaching myself to make bacon by this process (which involves daily application of dry cure to the piece of meat), I came across several references to bag methods of ‘dry’ curing.

In this ‘bacon in a bag’ method, you apply the cure to your meat, put the whole thing in a plastic bag, seal it up, and leave it in the fridge for several days, turning occasionally, and adding fresh cure once in mid-process. It removes the trivial once-daily intervention in the curing process, and the need to find space for a dish in the fridge for the length of the curing process, so might be even easier for busy busy folk… *if*, that is, the results stack up in terms of flavour and quality.

I used my normal black pepper cure for this experiment. My total cure weight was 10% of the weight of the meat and made up of 4 parts of supracure to 1 part of dark soft brown sugar with about a teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper added (see here for more advice on mixing your dry cure).

In addition to your piece of belly or loin pork and cure, you need a nice large freezer bag which is reasonably robust, and some sort of clip or bag tie to seal it. Sprinkle a bit of your cure into the bottom of the bag, place the washed and dried piece of pork in the bag skin-side down, and then continue to rub cure on the meat until you’ve used about half of your total dry curing mix. Seal the bag excluding as much air as possible, and put it in the fridge.

Turn the bag over from time to time (I turned it every time I went into the fridge for something else, but once a day is fine). You will notice quite a lot of pickle accumulating in the bag. After two days for belly, or three days for loin, take the bag out of the fridge.

Drain the pickle, and apply the rest of the cure, before returning the bag to the fridge for another three days. Effectively we’re curing in a very concentrated brine made from the applied salt and the meat’s own water. By this stage, at around the half-way mark, it’s already showing the changes I’d expect from successfully-curing bacon, which is a good sign!

After these three days have passed (making a total curing time of five or six days depending on your bacon cut), take the bacon out of the fridge. Remove it from the bag, rinse it off under the tap, pat dry carefully with kitchen paper, and return it to the fridge un-covered on a plate for 24 hours to finish drying and form a pellicle (that glossy, slightly tacky surface layer). After that, wrap it loosely in a piece of baking paper and keep it in the fridge until you want to slice it and eat it.

I rested mine for three days before slicing – I was planning to put it through the smoker but the weather on my day off wasn’t particularly suitable.

Sliced for breakfast this morning, the texture and appearance on slicing was exactly as I have come to expect from my home dry-cured back bacon.

I sliced away but retained the outside piece for lardons before carefully preparing four slices for frying. The piece of loin pork I used was very lean, and needed a little olive oil to the frying pan to really get things going. The bacon re-arranged itself in the pan as the rind buckled, but didn’t noticeably shrink, and there certainly wasn’t any of that nasty white watery muck we’re so used to seeing in commercial bacon!

Breakfast this morning was my bacon with some butcher’s black pudding and a fresh home-reared egg, served on a toasted English muffin. What could be nicer on a lazy Saturday?

And tasting wise? I would say I couldn’t detect a difference between bacon prepared this way, and my usual technique – but with one caveat. One of my slices was the second-slice from the edge after the one I’d held over for lardons. This slice, quite unlike the others, was unpalatably salty, with almost a salt ‘sting’ on the tongue. I think this can probably be ascribed to the concentration of cure applied at once in this method, despite a good long resting period, the outside surfaces of this bacon are quite aggressively salted. I would cut off a thicker end-slice in future when using this method – probably somewhere between 5mm and 10mm of the end grain at both ends. Used in a stew or sauce, it would be fine, but it’s less than ideal to eat as sliced bacon.

So, if you want an *even* easier method for home-cured bacon, do give this one a whirl! For me, though, it’s likely to be a technique I fall back on when I know I’m going to have a really busy week and still want some bacon for the following weekend.

See more Smoking & Curing posts >>

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Foraging Skills – how to get ahead!

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Kate Watson

I’ve been thinking about foraging recently. There’s very little quite as special as a lovely – and free! – treat garnered from a hedge. I’m thinking about a wild mushroom risotto, pots of crab apple jelly, a steaming blackberry crumble or a bubbling demijohn of rosehip wine. Foraging is really an autumn sport, though, borne from the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, so why am I writing about it now?

The thing that makes a really good forager isn’t being able to spot a laden crab apple tree at three hundred paces – it’s knowing where that tree is in the first place. Being a successful forager depends on keeping your eyes open all year round – if you notice things now, and remember them, you’re well on target for a bumper summer and autumn foraging season.

So just now, keep your eyes open for these, and make a mental note –

They’re hazel catkins, and where they’re hanging in profusion from the naked branches of hedges and shrubby trees now, there should be some lovely cob nuts in the autumn – they’ll be much harder to see then, when there are leaves on the tree, and hazels growing in mixed planting aren’t especially distinctive looking. Watch like a hawk though, come autumn, and pick them slightly green and sweet – because the mice will want them too!

A little note on the legality of foraging – if the item is being grown as a crop, then it’s not foraging, it’s scrumping (or stealing!). It’s very unlikely that cob nuts or blackberries growing in a field hedge are intended as a food crop, but the nuts and sloes in my garden hedge definitely are! So if it looks like someone’s caring for a tree or a hedge, it’s in an orchard or garden or looks intentionally planted, tread with care! That said, there at lots of edible crops grown incidentally on trees planted ornamentally, on streets and in council amenity spaces, particularly in urban areas – foraging doesn’t have to be just a country pursuit! – look out for apples, plums and cherries, too!

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Finally – Kate’s Big Country Skills Bacon Challenge is here!

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Kate Watson

I love home-cured bacon, and I think you will too! The experience of making streaky bacon for the first time was one of the main motivations behind setting up this blog, and more recently I’ve had great success with home-cured back bacon, too. And yet despite how simple it is, and how wonderful the final product, the most common reaction I get is ‘Oh but that sounds very complicated, you’re braver than me!’.

In order encourage as many people as possible to try this simplest of all foody experiences, I’ve come up with the following, very simple plan. I’m calling it ‘Kate’s Big Country Skills Bacon Challenge’.

I will post an 80g pack of ‘Supracure’ curing salt (enough to cure up to 1kg of bacon) to the first 10 people to send me their UK postal address.

Then, I’ll post day-by-day instructions to follow.

Thank you everyone, I now have a full set of volunteers! Instructions, and hopefully feedback, coming soon!

That’s it, simple as that! All I want from you in return is to make your bacon, and to write about it, take photos of it, tweet about it, post to facebook about it and generally brag to anyone who’ll listen about how awesome, easy and worthwhile it is! With any luck, for some of you it may even become a habit of a lifetime.

In order to make your very own bacon, you will need to provide a piece of fresh pork belly or pork loin up to 1kg in weight (ideally with the skin on), a non-metallic dish big enough to hold the meat, ~20g of sugar (soft dark sugar is best), some cling film, a refrigerator, and a couple of minutes a day for five consecutive days.

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Back To Basics – home cured back bacon from start to delicious end

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Kate Watson

Home cured streaky bacon has been a constant fixture in my house since I first made it back in October – in fact I’ve not bought any ‘commercial’ bacon since. Back bacon used to be our house favourite though, before I started curing. A couple of weeks ago I saw a tied pork loin ‘roasting’ joint for sale half-price in the local co-op, and it seemed to good to refuse.

For home-cured back bacon, you will require –

A piece of pork loin. The roasting joint was a bit big so I cut it in half to give me a piece about 650g in weight.
Curing salt such as Supracure (see the Suppliers List for details), 8% of the total weight of the meat, and
Sugar (soft brown sugar is ideal) 2% of the total weight of the meat, to make a total cure weight of 10%
A non-metallic dish big enough to contain the meat, and some cling film to cover.

That’s it – I wanted to keep the first effort as simple as possible!

Weigh out the cure ingredients and mix them together well. Now rub about a quarter of the cure mix all over the pork, including on the skin. You can see it start to draw out moisture from the meat straight away. Cover the dish loosely with some cling film, and put it in the fridge until tomorrow.

The next day, there will be some liquid in the bottom of the dish. This is the ‘pickle’ and is made up of some of the curing mix dissolved in the liquid that’s been drawn out of the meat. It’s completely normal, so don’t worry. Pour it away, or your dry-cure will pretty quickly turn into a brine cure. Now take about a quarter of the remaining cure and rub it all over the meat again. Put it back in the dish the other way up to last time (so skin side up, if you started skin-side down).

Repeat this process for another three days (so that you’ve rubbed cure into the bacon five days running). By day 3 you should notice a distinct difference in the texture of the meat, it will be firmer in consistency and a bit darker pink in colour.

On the sixth day (so one day longer than the streaky bacon process – this is because the meat is thicker than belly pork), remove the bacon from the dish, rinse it under the tap, dry it carefully with kitchen towel, wrap it loosely with greaseproof paper and put it back in the fridge. Ideally, wait a couple of days before you start eating it, do let it rest at least overnight.

Then slice your amazing bacon with a sharp knife, and cook however you prefer. I like to pan-fry my back bacon. This one is gorgeous and I can only heartily recommend you make some for yourself!

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Waxing Frugal – making a recycled scented chunk candle

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Kate Watson

Everyone loves a candle, they cast a lovely warm flickery light, and, chosen carefully, can fill a room with beautiful scent (sure, sometimes they can fill a room with the scent of cheap pot-pourri, but this is a matter of taste!). After Christmas, we had several left over candle ends around the house, and rather than throw them out, I wanted to do something creative and recycle them. But while there are lots of great candle-making kits out there, I didn’t really want to spend any money on the process. So this is a candle-making project that, with the exception of some wick and a wick sustainer, you can do entirely with things that you already have around your home and kitchen.

For this project, you will need –

Two old candle-ends, preferably one coloured & scented and one plain, total weight 300 – 400g
Empty Pringles tin (I recommend starting with a full one, and working on it!)
Large saucepan, a trivet (or an old saucer or side plate), and a large empty tin can (I used an empty malt extract can from home brewing, but any large catering size tin can will do)
Stirrer (I used a large wooden lollipop stick, anything will do but not something you plan to use with food!)
Chopping surface (again ideally not one you plan to use for food use in future)
Large knife
6in length of appropriate wick, a wick sustainer, and something to use as a wick pin (a kebab stick is ideal)
Kitchen hob
Scales
Jam / sugar / preserving thermometer, old tea strainer (recommended but not absolutely required)

Gather up your equipment, starting with the knife and the pringles tin. Cut the Pringles tin down to about 4″ high using your knife, and make a couple of ‘notches’ in the top on opposite sides of the top.

You’ll need to get an estimate of the capacity of your candle mould, so put a sandwich bag inside the Pringles tin, put it on the scales to zero, and then fill the bag with water to about a 1/2″ below the top. The weight in grams of water is a good estimate of the volume in mls, as wax is slightly less dense than water (it floats on water, after all), you can reduce this estimate by about 10% to get the weight in wax required to fill the mould to this level. I came up with 300g and used around 270g as a target weight of wax.

Now, cut up your coloured candle. Try to cut it into even cubes a bit bigger than half an inch cubed, but it’s likely you’ll struggle, and if the pieces are a bit rough, don’t worry. From what you’ve chopped up, sort to one side and weigh all the sensible chunks, leaving the dust and small fragments aside (wrap these up for another project). Weigh your coloured chunks (mine weighed about 140g) and put them in the mould to check how high up they come. Ideally this will be about the target ‘fill’ level. Now roughly chunk up your white wax candle. It doesn’t matter what size and shape these pieces end up, but the smaller they are the faster they’ll melt. When working with old candles, try to avoid including the ‘melt pool’ from the candle as this will be dirty wax and may well include bits of old burnt wick and suchlike, which you don’t want in your shiny new candle.

A word about wicks, before we go on – the size and construction of wick you need depends on the chemistry of the candle-wax and the width of the melt pool you want in your candle (which is closely related to the diameter of your candle, usually). When working with recycled waxes, the chemistry involves a fair bit of guesswork. I assumed the waxes were a basic paraffin pillar blend, since this is the most usual situation for commercial candles manufactured to a price point. There’s a useful wick size guide here. (See my suppliers list and library for more reading.) I used an LX16 wick which should have been a good match for the ~70mm diameter Pringles mould. Secure the end of the wick into the wick sustainer using pliers.

Now, start melting your wax. Put the white wax into the large tin, and put the tin inside your saucepan on the trivet. Fill the saucepan with water so that it comes up the side of the tin about an inch and a half. Use the thermometer, if you have one, in the water. You don’t want this to boil, but ideally it should stay around 75 degrees centigrade, which should be enough to melt the wax without risk of overheating. The flash-point of wax is quite close to the melting point, and at the flash point the wax is at risk of catching fire, particularly if you have a naked flame in the vicinity (for instance, if you’re using a gas hob), so be careful and heat the wax very gently.

Once the wax is melted, you need to prime the wick, which just means dipping the wick into the wax so that it can be absorbed onto the surface of the cotton. Also dip the sustainer in the wax, and use this to secure the sustainer to the centre of the bottom of the Pringles tin. Stretch the wick up vertically and wrap it around the wick pin to keep it centred in the mould.

Now, arrange the chunks of coloured wax in the mould around the wick, trying to make sure you don’t close off any pockets which would prevent the melted wax filling all the gaps. When you’re happy, pour about 90% of the melted wax into the mould, pouring through the tea strainer if you see any ‘bits’ in it. Keep the remaining 10% over a low heat to keep it liquid, and continue to keep a close eye on it.

The wax will shrink as it cools and this will form a dip or a ‘well’ near the wick, which will affect the candle as it burns. Encourage the candle to cool by putting the mould inside a plastic bag and immersing it into a bowl of water. You will need to weigh it down to keep it immersed, I used a marble pestle, but anything heavy will do. This is of course quite faffy, and if it’s a nice cold day, you’d probably do as well to put the mould outside for half an hour or so.

As the wax sets and you start to see a well forming near the wick, make a couple of holes in this area with a skewer. Once the surface of the wax is springy but not hard to the touch, pour over the rest of the wax tapping the mould to make sure it goes into the holes you’ve made near the wick. Now set the mould somewhere nice and cold to set – in the fridge if it’s a warm day, or outside if it’s January in the UK.

After a couple of hours the wax will have set hard. I was expecting to have to sacrifice the Pringles can at the end of the moulding, but the wax had shrunk back nicely from the sides, and I was able to ease the candle out without having to destroy the mould – however your results may vary and I wouldn’t lose to much sleep about it if you have to break the mould away from the candle. Trim the wick so that about 1cm is proud from the surface of the wax.

I’m thrilled with the results, which I think are very pretty for a first effort. The white wax is a little bit ‘dirty’ which I probably could have concealed by using a little bit of ivory or honey-coloured candle dye. I poured the bulk of the white wax in two ‘goes’ and you can see the line between them, which is something I’d avoid in future.

My only real criticism of the finished candle would be that I chose too small a wick – the melt pool the candle produces is quite a bit narrower than the body of the candle, and stops short of the sides by about half an inch all the way around. I suspect this is to do with the chemistry of the original white candle, which we stopped burning for a very similar reason – lesson learned! If I re-make this candle with the remains of the white wax from this batch I’ll use an LX20 wick which may give a better result. The melt pool is very pretty though, a lovely dark pink colour from the mixed waxes and gives a gentle berry aroma. For the cost of a new piece of wick, and a little bit of kitchen chemistry, it’s a beautiful, and extremely thrifty, scented candle.

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Frugal Food – stuffed breast of lamb, roast dinner on a budget

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Kate Watson

Breast of lamb is a rather unfashionable cut these days. In my household it’s usually known as ‘lamb belly’ by analogy with the matching cut of pork. It’s made up of the abdominal body wall, starting with some ribs just in front of the diaphragm and extending backwards. Folded in three and wrapped in cling-film, it’s a rather uninspiring looking cut. You won’t get it at the supermarket, and it won’t be on display at the butchers, but if you ask it’s likely you’ll get a whole one for not much more than £1. With a very little bit of effort, you have one of the most cost effective (and tasty!) roast dinners you can buy.

We first discovered breast of lamb when we started buying half-lambs from local smallholders. I wish I’d discovered it when I was a student, I could have had some fantastic roast Sunday dinners on a budget!

This is a great meal made almost entirely from the store cupboard. You will need:

One breast of lamb
Some breadcrumbs
An onion (red or white)
Garlic, several cloves
Rosemary, thyme, sage (fresh or dried)
One egg
Kitchen / butchers string
Potatoes / parsnips / sweet potatoes / swede
Some green veg (I had some frozen peas, but anything will do)

Deboned breast of lamb

First of all you have a little bit of butchery to do. It’s unlikely the ribs will have been trimmed out, so you’ll have to do this yourself. Be careful, and patiently cut around and along each rib with a paring knife and lift it out from the ‘inside’ of the breast. With practice this is no more than a five minute job, though it might take a bit longer to start with. It’s likely your breast has been in the fridge, so the meat will be cold. Stop if you notice your fingertips getting numb, and rinse them under warm water to warm them up again – you’ll have less sensory feedback from cold fingertips and you’re much more likely to make a mistake and cut yourself – which is not the aim of the exercise!

Try to preserve as much meat as you can attached to the breast – but if you accidentally cut a piece off (and there are some annoying bits of diaphragm which are quite tricky to keep attached) just put it back as you’ll be rolling and tying the ‘joint’ later.

Now make the stuffing. Mix the finely chopped onion, crushed / minced garlic, breadcrumbs, herbs and egg together. Season with a bit of salt and pepper. Then spread this across the inside of the breast and roll it up, starting at the narrow end (where the ribs weren’t).

Tie the rolled joint up with string using a butchers knot. This involves making a series of linked loops and tying off at both ends, and is a useful knack to learn. It’s also not dissimilar to the knotting technique used for casting a cow! Put the rolled join in a roasting dish, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with pepper and dried rosemary, and put into a low oven (about 160C) for two and a half hours.

Prepare whatever roast veggies you prefer (I did spuds and sweet potato) and start these at the appropriate time. You could even have yorkshire puddings (we did!).

Then in due course get the joint out to rest, prepare your green veg and gravy, and dish up. Add some nice fruit jelly, if you have some. Crab apple and chilli jelly was a perfect accompaniment.

This is a fabulous roast dinner, and will serve three or four for nearly nothing – we’re greedy so it fed two hungry adults! Serve with a nice beer or a glass of red wine, and enjoy!

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Happy New Year!

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Kate Watson

Here’s wishing all of you a very happy 2012, and hoping your new year’s celebrations went with a bang! I should have written this yesterday, of course, but timeliness has never been one of my more natural talents (as people still waiting on Christmas cards from me will attest)!

I’m ambitious to do experiment with even more creative, country skills and crafts next year, and write about them too! On my list is more brewing (cider, beer, and of course country wines), more curing and smoking, and experiments with sewing, crafting, recycling and thrift. More food and recipes, of course, as well as some fruit & veg growing as the season starts to get warmer. I also plan to write a little about my hens and poultry keeping, and to try some new crafts – at the moment I’m reading about candle and soap making, so watch this space. Perhaps this year my Advent candle might even be homemade!

Thank you to all of you who have been reading the blog since it started back in October 2011 – both here on WordPress and in the syndicated feeds – your comments and feedback mean a lot to me and are very helpful, so please keep them coming! I’d love to hear of any suggestions you might have for things I should be looking into and trying, too!

Country Skills for Modern Life

Some of the cool and useful food, craft and sustainability skills that your grandparents knew, but probably didn't teach you!

Category Archives: Tested

Smoked Trout – so simple, so tasty, and all home-made

Better than Branded – homemade sun-dried tomato ketchup

What’s Your Beef? Beth’s wonderful home-cured salt beef

Bacon Basics – bacon-in-a-bag method for ‘dry’ curing at home

Foraging Skills – how to get ahead!

Finally – Kate’s Big Country Skills Bacon Challenge is here!

Back To Basics – home cured back bacon from start to delicious end

Waxing Frugal – making a recycled scented chunk candle

Frugal Food – stuffed breast of lamb, roast dinner on a budget

Happy New Year!

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