A Few Delicious Things I Ate This Week

LOTS of Panettone, a plant based book launch and a hearty bowl of ramen (plus a giveaway)

If you were invited to an evening of champagne and panettone could you resist? I for sure couldn’t and that’s how I found myself in central London trying 27 different panettone over a glass or two of something bubbly. Now, I do love panettone, but I find so many of them disappointing, overly sweet and lacking in flavour. What I’m saying is that I’m picky. It’s also hard to know where to look when you’re on the hunt for a good loaf, especially when buying from a big retailer. I am lucky that London is filled with brilliant bakeries and many of them recently have turned their hand to making panettone, the last couple of years has seen a real growth in homegrown panettone. Last year, we had a fabulous version from Sourdough By Sophia, who knows who’s I I’ll try this year. But back to the tasting, the folk at Sous Chef organised the evening and they brought along a whopping 27 different varieties made by several Italian producers (Sous Chef sell even more but this what they had in stock on that particular day).

My tastes tend to run to the classic, or at least the simple, so the more out there flavours, the filled or glazed panettone, don’t really do anything for me. I want lots of juicy fruit, a healthy dose of candied peel and a strong citrus aroma. Out of all the different versions that I tried, no I definitely didn’t try all 27, two particularly stood out. First was Sous Chef’s own house panettone that they have now commissioned for the last two years. It was by far the most generous of filling, not at all dry and with a wonderful heady citrus aroma and flavour. A sure fired winner. For similar reasons I was also a big fan of the fiasconaro traditional hand wrapped panettone. This version comes in two sizes. If you have a massive family gathering over the holidays and you’re big fans of panettone they make a humongous 3kg version which comes in beautifully understated packaging. Funnily enough, Fiasconaro are also the producers that make the incredibly popular Dolce and Gabana Panettone range and, as an unbiased party, found the own brand traditional version a much better option. The Dolce and Gabbana versions are also at least double the price.

After inhaling far too much panettone I shot across town for the launch of Ed And Natasha Tatton’s debut book Bred. I’ve been excited about this book for a while, having followed Ed on social media for many years and watched his journey over in Canada. The book is focused on plant based baking and covers both the bakeries sourdough baking and their general plant based baking; so if you’re looking for more than just another sourdough book this has a much wider scope. I think the last couple years have seen such a real surge in the representation of vegan baking and what I love with both this book and the other excellent vegan book from 2023, A New Way To Bake by Phil Khoury, is that the ingredient list is familiar and approachable, it’s vegan baking as approachable as possible.

The launch was a fun evening with lots of Ed’s baking on offer, using recipes from the book, including his excellent plat based pizzas and a phenomenal cinnamon babka, based of his best selling cinnamon buns. Ed also gave me some of his sourdough starter which he dehydrated. I plan on bringing it to life and baking something from the book this weekend. The book comes out next week but I am lucky to have an extra copy on my hands so, leave a comment down below (any comment will count but it would be great to heat from you guys what youd like to see on the newsletter in the next year) and, I’ll choose someone at random to win the book. Comment by Monday to be in with a chance of winning the book.

You cant of missed that the seasons have well and truly changed, and it is now firmly sweater weather, otherwise known as soup season, stew season or ramen season. When the pandemic hit and we were stuck in our homes, I got so bored of cooking. The constant struggle to keep things interesting, desperately trying to avoid falling into a repetitive pattern of the same meal, week in week out, I just lost my usual love for being in the kitchen. In more regular times, our home life is broken up by restaurants, friends, socialising. Cooking night after night, when you haven’t left the house in days, felt, at times, completely uninspiring and a total chore. So, like many of you I’d wager, we fell a bit in love with restaurant kits. This halfway house between home cooking and a takeaway felt like a treat, a memory of dining out, and a welcome break from proper cooking.

During that time we tried so many different restaurants, often from our favourite places and on the odd occasion places out of London or restaurants we’d never heard of before. Fast forward to today and many of those restaurants went back to their core focus and the kits fell by the way side. Of course there is still folk like Dishpatch doing great stuff with restaurants to keep the kit idea going, but there are still a few places making it a big part of their business. One such company is the Cardiff ramen restaurant Matsudai. I first head of James and his restaurant from my friend Tim Anderson, the chef and cookbook author responsible for multiple brilliant Japanese cookbooks; when he recommends things I tend to listen. We ordered some ramen kits from Matsudai and have been hooked ever since, we have ordered them multiple times and I am always impressed by the quality. A few weeks I went to a lunch to celebrate the launch of Tim’s excellent new ramen book and, unexpectedly, met Chris from Matsudai. After some great chat about our mutual love of Japan, he mentioned he was teaming up with Tim once again to sell some ramen kits inspired by recipes in Tims book. He offered to send me some to try and of course I said yes. The kit he sent was Nov’s offering, a fabulous Hokkaido style curry ramen. It was the perfect bowl of noodles for a wet and cold evening, a warning but not too spicy level of heat, deliciously chewy noodles and some fabulous char siu pork. All in all it was a truly brilliant bowl of ramen, something I would never expect to cook in my own home.

For paid subsribers this week I have a fabulous Self Saucing Sticky Toffee Coffee Pudding. Upgrade to a paid subscription to get the recipe.