Читать книгу Fresh and Wild Cookbook: A Real Food Adventure - Ysanne Spevack - Страница 41

This is a lunch idea for all those lucky people who don’t go out to work. Freelances, mums, people recovering from an illness, and students are the main ones that come to mind. Being at home means you can easily whack the tomatoes in the oven around about the time you break for elevenses. That way, when lunchtime comes, you’ll be eating a culinary delicacy without having to lift a finger.

Tymsboro’ is a fantastic artisan-made English goat’s cheese, dusted in salt and charcoal and shaped like a pyramid without the top. It’s pretty exciting, because it’s liquid around the edges, but is harder inside, which gives it a great contrast and balance of consistency. It is, however, unpasteurized so pregnant women will have to skip this one until the bun is out the oven. The rest of you can read on …

It’s an unpasteurized and seasonal cheese, as the maker believes in doing things the old way. Mary Holbrook makes the cheese at Sleight Farm, in the Mendips, just south of Bath. She’s got together a flock of naughty goats that are three ancient heirloom breeds: British Saanen, British Alpine and Anglo-Nubian goats. Not only are they well suited to life in the Mendips, they make great tasting milk with just the right amount of fat to make creamy Tymsboro’ cheese.

And they’re all naughty because, being goats, they just can’t help it. There are about 90 goats in Mary’s flock and there’s nothing they like better than running away. It’s not that they don’t like life at Sleight Farm, it’s just that they love being bad. They’re fussy eaters, too, who prefer nettles and thistles to lots of grass. But they’re in luck, because Mary’s fields are full of wild weeds and meadow flowers instead of the usual mono-culture of grass, grass and more grass. This isn’t just out of kindness to her goats. Mary knows that a mixture of wild plants in their diet means lovely fragrant milk for her cheeses.

Mary basically adopted the French method for making traditional charcoal-coated goat’s cheese, then developed it and made it her own. She uses the very freshest goat’s milk to start off the cheese-making process – it’s never any older than milk that’s been milked from the goats the night before. That’s why the cheese is seasonal, as the goats like making milk from spring through to autumn, resting up over the winter in nice cosy straw-lined barns.

To get the cheese-making process going, Mary gently heats the milk (but doesn’t pasteurize it), adds a culture and a tiny bit of rennet, then leaves the liquid for 24 hours to make a soft curd. This is where the real skill and cheese-making flair comes in, because the way you handle this delicate curd will deeply affect the final flavour of the cheese. It’s fragile stuff, as the fat globules in the goat’s milk are small and easily broken, spoiling the cheese’s consistency, too. This is also what makes goat’s milk more easily digestible by people than cow’s milk.

So slowly and very carefully, the curds are spooned into the moulds, ready to be matured over the next three to four weeks. Penicillin in the ripening room’s air naturally makes a beeline for the little pyramids, finishing the maturing process. The cheeses are then turned out of the moulds and dusted with salt and charcoal ready to be sent to us.

But why pyramids without tops? It’s another French thing … Apparently Napoleon was sitting by a traditional French pyramid-shaped goat’s cheese when he was told that his army hadn’t managed to invade and conquer Egypt. His first reaction was to chop off the top of the pyramid in an act of defiance – bet that taught the pesky Egyptians who was boss.

The finished Tymsboro’ cheese has an almondy-lemony flavour, which the acidity of the slow-roasted tomatoes sets off perfectly.

And if you make more slow-roasted tomatoes than you need, you can store them in jars filled with olive oil ready for next time.

Fresh & Wild’s watercress is grown by John Hurd at his farm in Wiltshire. John’s been growing watercress for over 50 years, so what he doesn’t know about it can be written on a stamp. It’s one of the most difficult salad crops to grow, as it’s not grown in soil like most other plants. Instead, watercress is grown in shallow trays filled with a precise mixture of layered gravels and sands. These beds are then flooded with freshly drawn spring water from the freshwater springs deep in the chalky Wiltshire grounds of the farm, with up to half a million gallons of spring water flowing through each acre every day.

John invented the techniques needed to grow watercress organically on a large enough scale to supply shops. Previously, large-scale watercress farms in the UK routinely used copious amounts of molluscicides, pesticides that are designed to specifically kill slugs and snails. In fact, nonorganic watercress farms still do, hence non-organic watercress is one of the most pesticide-rich crops you can buy.

Slugs and snails would love to live in John’s organic watercress trays and munch our tasty peppery greens, but he’s worked out a way to keep the trays snail and slug free without resorting to poisonous chemicals. This is a real breakthrough, as watercress farms were plagued in the 1910s and 1920s with a type of snail that passes on liver fluke to the people that eat it. John Hurd’s meticulous organic cleansing methods ensure that the organic watercress we eat today is free of both nasty molluscicides and potentially sickness-causing beasties.

The strong peppery taste of watercress is a real wake-up call to the senses, and it’s full of get-up-and-go vitamins, too. As John says: ‘Watercress contains more vitamin C than fresh oranges and more calcium than cow’s milk.’ It’s also packed with zinc, magnesium and vitamins B6 and E, plus the beta-carotene and iron that our bodies synthesize into vitamin A. The balance of these vitamins is causing a stir in the cancer healing community, as they’re proven to protect from, and help reverse, free-radical damage. Watercress has also been proclaimed an aphrodisiac since ancient times. Get it on.