After 4 more days, I couldn’t resist any longer, so I opened the bottle. I know I should have left it a couple of days longer, but it was good – effervescent, instead of fizzy, but it definitely had the right taste.
This is cold smoking, not hot. The small mazelike device (the ProQ Cold Smoke Generator) is filled with wood dust (“today, I will be mostly using oak”) and set to smoulder with a small tea-light, which is removed once the dust catches. After that, it will produce smoke without heat for up to 10 hours.
So the Brighton part of the trip was meeting up with some friends, and 4 days of shopping, eating and cinema. I have already mentioned Apollo 18, which was a disaster. However, I thought Rise of the Planet of the Apes was fun, and I really liked Fright Night (in 3D), featuring David Tennant and Colin Farrell.
So I think this is a wonderful idea. Ready-baked pastry cases, available by post, in all sorts of varieties – sweet pastry, savoury pastry, choux, tartlets and vol-au-vents.
As it happens, we didn’t open them, but I just had one as part of my lunch. They were very plain, almost tasteless. On examining the packet, I found they were actually flavoured: “Jacket Potato with Creamy Butter” flavour.
Anyway, the UK manufacturer is selling a limited number of refurbished (but otherwise fine) Superfast Thermapens at half price (28.80, instead of 56 quid), on eBay, so I thought I would give people a heads up:
It was dirt cheap, so I bought two, on the principle that while I had the Traeger going, I may as well fill the shelf.
I read a nice recipe for loin of pork, where it is cooked on a bed of cooking apples, which go to make the sauce. I liked the sound of this, so I looked for a loin yesterday, but they were all quite small. In the end I bought one that might feed a family of 4, so I also bought a tenderloin, which was on offer.
I had planned to do just bangers and burgers, the usual fare, but instead of grilling, I was going to slow cook them on “smoke” setting. This would be a bit different from what I had served before from my Weber kettle, and should also mean that when we broke for lunch, the food would all be ready.
So I thought I would have a try at making a fatty. A fatty is a large sausage-like object, made from sausage or luncheon meat, and smoked. They can be as simple as a log of sausage covered in rub, or wrapped in bacon, or they can have all sorts of fillings.
