British is best?

While researching the web looking for information on the next Slow Food Fair in Turin I came across some interesting stuff. I found an interesting article about culinary trade fairs and one was about food from all around the world. Someone reviewed it and said the French were rocking all their typical produce, the Chinese, Italians, Indians etc, etc were all promoting their produce but then when it came to the English stall, it was all about piss poor reproductions of world food processed into tins! That is what the whole British thing was about, Sharwoods curries, Heinz spag hoops and chilli con carne,vesta chow mein and that kind of thing.

So what has been the British contribution to world cuisine? We’ve taken everyon else’s cuisine, mulched it into some kind of, I don’t know, then processed the living daylights out of it and put it in a tin or better still, frozen it. So then there’s this embarrassing situation at an international trade fair, Jesus Christ! I mean we do dairy brilliantly but what’s happened to our dairy farmers? Big businesses have ground them into the dirt and here we are we’re selling tinned stuff! So what’s our nation’s favourite dishes? Chilli con carne, spag bol and curry. And what have we done to make them our national dishes? We’ve stripped all the flavour out of them and put it in tins!

A few days later, I was reading another article and it got my blood pressure rising yet again. It said that all British ex-pats around the world crave is a Frey Bentos steak pie. All they crave is Bachelors mushy peas, all they crave is Twiglets. And you think, hang on a minute, you’ve got peas where you are, you’ve got flour to make pastry and you have fresh meat. All you’re doing is perpetuating the belief that all we eat is processed food and it’s really sad.

I keep trying to look at the bright side of things, how there’s all these amazing restaurants in London, one of the culinary capitals of the world but we can’t get that mixed up with the state of the nation because you realise that too many Brits are still eating all this highly processed, nutrition free food.

Hey, I’m not saying it’s all bad, but we just continue to go further down this road without stopping to look and see where we are and realise that other countries are laughing at us…And saying we’re too busy to cook is a total bullshit excuse. What, busier and busier dying? The same tired old ‘not everyone can afford to eat organic’ excuse is just smoke and mirrors. Produce in your local market is much cheaper than supermarket stuff. Let’s face it, at the end of the day cheap fast food is not worth the expense it incurs to your well being.

Gip Advisor – The half baked ramblings of a fried brain in brown butter

Street feasts

These days, it seems you can’t turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper without people talking about street food and the rise and rise of food trucks. The other day, my friend rung me up to chat about some gluten free pizza ideas. He’s bought an old ambulance, he’s rocking the festivals and he’s doing pizza, just pizza. And I got to thinking about all this street food and where it’s heading.

I was down at the Street Feast in Hackney recently, which is brilliant by the way. Wander from van to van and you can discover all kinds of food from a chicken wing to the most diverse choices you could ever imagine, from lobster mac n cheese to vampire tamales etc. I know street food is called street food for the very reason that you buy it from a van on the street, but bloody hell sell your dish with some thought of where people are gonna eat it, how they’re gonna eat it, what they’re gonna use to mop up that half a pint of liquor/gravy/chilli sauce or whatever is oozing out of an unsuitable bit of paper over your keks!

As you may have gathered, I don’t like getting shit on my clothes……and some street food ideas just aren’t suitable. Some things you need to be sat down with a big glass of red wine actually in a glass and someone to bring you another bottle who doesn’t have to fecken queue for 15 minutes while your dinner dies on an old wobbly bit of wood tabling as your other half guards your bit of bench space with only a single arse and a small backpack.

Street feast Pescara, street food the way it should be done

Pescara, a city on the Adriatic coast of Italy, celebrates St. Andrea, the patron saint of fishermen, with a ‘festa’ at the end of July and it’s my favourite street feast for gluttonising and supping.
Every July you’ll find thousands of people walking around the dock area, you can’t move it’s that busy.

There’s a lot of open kitchens and they’re doing all kinds of fish and seafood on the street as well as sheep skewers called arrosticini. For just 5 Euros you can get ten delicate sticks threaded with tender, juicy, perfectly seasoned lamb grilled on coals. We usually buy around 50 of them and devour them in minutes.

Of course there’s all kinds of fantastic seafood on offer too, from squid and tiny red mullet to King prawns etc all caught just off the docks. The first thing that’s amazing is that they’re doing it without compromise. Watching how an open kitchen has literally hundreds of arrosticini on the go at one time on hot coals, all coming off perfectly cooked and flying out to customers 20, 30 or 50 at a time is an enlightening thing to observe, especially if you fancied yourself as a bit of a BBQ ‘expert’ before. It changed the way I cook outside for sure!

But the thing they do so well there is keep it simple. They know people are probably going to be eating standing up or maybe sat shoulder to shoulder at a wooden table. So they don’t add messy sauces to their prawns or put the red mullet into a green thai chilli curry. They crumb it, fry it and . throw it on a plate with a slice of lemon. Quick, simple and easy for you to gobble up. Street food doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel to be a success, it just needs to be tasty and appropriate for the environment it’s being eaten in. Get that right and you’re onto a winner.