Supermarket pizza hacks: what do you put on yours?

In adherence with the – *cough*, it all happens in my kitchen – strict laboratory conditions under which the Guardian’s Supermarket Sweep taste tests are conducted, I was obliged to eat a recent lineup of margherita pizzas in their unadorned, au naturel state. But as became apparent BTL, many of us never eat plain supermarket pizza.
At Naylor Towers, for instance, it is almost unheard of for a supermarket pizza to pass through the kitchen without it being tricked-out and turned into something genuinely indulgent by the addition of extra ingredients. This is necessary to compensate for the, shall we say, more judicious application of toppings that takes place in the factories where these things are made. (Apologies if you thought it was all done in a farmhouse in Tuscany by a crack team of nonnas. It isn’t.) But, like anything in cooking – or, in this case, assembly – there is an art to transforming your supermarket pie.

Cheese

If you are going to whack a load of extra cheese on there, it is wise to first remove any meat or vegetables. After you have retro-fitted the cheese, place them back on top. Otherwise, they will be hidden under a blanket of dairy, which may prevent the heat penetrating sufficiently to cook them through. What cheese you add (grated, of course) is a matter of taste, but there are some broad rules worth observing. Ignore them and you may well end up with a soggy base and/or a pizza swimming in grease:
1) You don’t need half as much cheese as you might imagine. It is going to melt and spread, remember. Don’t go overboard.
2) Hard cheeses, such as cheddar, readily sweat off fat and moisture when heated. Add too much and, well …
3) Beware “wet” cheeses such as good-quality buffalo mozzarella and, worse, burrata. Unlike a wood-fired pizza oven, where any moisture would quickly evaporate, your domestic oven is not that hot. Any watery excess will likely soak into your (limp, disintegrating) base.

Meat

Raw meat (for instance, if you want to double up on spicy ground lamb), may need to be cooked or partially cooked first, depending on how long the pizza will be in the oven and how dry you like your meat. Bacon will cook in the 10-20 minutes it takes to heat up a fresh/frozen pizza, but, sitting amid all that moisture, it won’t necessarily go crispy. Better to pan-fry it and scatter it over near the end. Indeed, generally – it is a matter of taste versus convenience, of course – I would only add cured meats to a pizza. Parma ham, salami or chorizo work on a pizza in a way in which peking duck or chunks of pork belly simply don’t. Pizzas were designed to topped with thinly sliced ingredients.

Vegetables

Vegetables are more problematic, which is just one of the reasons why nobody ever says: “Hey, let’s go mad and throw some extra fennel on that pizza!” Not only do they need to be finely sliced, but many vegetables also need significant prep. Unless they are softened in a little garlicky butter first, extra mushrooms and leeks end up shrivelled and dehydrated. Onions need sweating or they will emerge from the oven hot but oddly raw in texture. Likewise, bitter bell peppers with their tough, plasticky skins – to be made in any way pleasantly edible, they first need to be roasted and skinned, and who has time for that, to top a supermarket pizza? Sliced tomato, despite its water content, works reasonably well as a pizza addition – although it is hardly going to set your pulse racing in excitement.

Extras

There is far more enjoyment to be derived by titivating your pizza with what are essentially seasonings, rather than vegetables. Rubbing olive oil into the exposed rim (in Naples, cornicione) softens up the often inedible edge of a drier, breadier base. Similarly, swirling a few spoonfuls of pesto over a pizza is almost never a bad thing. Chilli is a useful addition in the right circumstances but, personally, I avoid adding anchovies. Even if you blitz them to a pulp, distributing them correctly – that is, sparingly and not in great clumps of salty, abrasiveness fishiness – is an art I have yet to master. It goes without saying that dried herbs are a foul abomination on a pizza and that any fresh ones should only be added as it is served.
So how do you jazz up your pizza? And is that the only ready meal that you augment, or are there tricks that you can share to ramp up bought-in moussaka, fish pie or lasagne?

Why 'best-restaurant' lists are nothing of the sort

Best-restaurant lists are something of a love/hate thing for me. I basically hate them but love being included in them, for the same reason I liked being on the art wall in school (even though I knew it was because I’d sucked up all year to get there). Recognition in any form for hard work is always appreciated. I have no problem with lists existing. But I wonder whether they ever actually tell us anything useful.

This weekend we saw a new list of Yelp’s 100 best UK restaurants. Number 1 was taken by Dishoom, an upmarket Indian concept with three big sites in London. Dishoom has members of the Tilda rice family and, therefore, significant funding behind it. It also has excellent customer service, the food is faultless and all the sites have a great vibe going on so it’s not necessarily an unworthy winner. There are a lot of my favourite places in the list too. Patty and Bun makes No 9 for serving great burgers. Barrafina also makes the top 10 and Hawksmoor is at No 22.
It’s a nice list, and I’m pleased for everyone in it, but, as with as a lot of such user-generated content, it’s also a very weird list. In at No 6 is a place in Edinburgh called the Hula Juice Bar and Gallery. I spent 25 years of my life in Edinburgh and I’ve seen it flourish into one of the best cities in the county for eating out. I haven’t been to Hula Juice Bar, but I think it’s fair to ask: is a cafe that sells juice, bagels, cakes and hot wraps, really likely to be the best restaurant in Edinburgh, much less the 6th best in the UK? Is it even a restaurant at all?

On the other end of the scale you have lists such as the “world’s 50 best” which are about as far from user-generated as you can get. These lists for fine-dining places only. Chefs, food writers and restaurateurs admire the level of skill in the kitchen, and the attention to detail put into in every aspect of the customer experience. Just because I know more people who have enjoyed dining at a Street Feast event or Meat Liquor more than have enjoyed dining at El Celler de Can Roca doesn’t mean I think either should rank higher in any list. The truth is stark: neither list is genuinely about finding the best. It is extremely subjective. User-generated lists are simply about meeting our daily expectations and the world’s 50 best is about innovation and industry influence. Which is fine.
A boundary-pushing restaurant which sells 23 dishes to a customer will have a much harder task of satisfying that customer’s expectation, especially when it has been told it’s one of the best in the world. On the other hand, a local cafe that delivers great food for less than a tenner can easily meet its customers’ expectations. That doesn’t mean it’s better or worse than the likes of Heston Blumenthals’ Fat Duck but its simply incomparable on almost every level. It’s like rating the best football team in the country by number of games won rather than by league. The winner might be some pub team from Kilmarnock that won 63 out of the 64 games it played that year. Doesn’t make it better than Man City though.

Of course food isn’t grim up north

 Solid stodge … toad-in-the-hole. Photograph: Colin Campbell for the Guardian
If you listened to the Today programme on Tuesday morning, you may have heard it (try to) revive that old saw about there being a distinct north-south divide in food. Inspired presumably by Christmas sales data from Amazon showing that while Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest cookbook, Plenty More, was the sixth-bestselling gift in London – it did not make the wider UK top 10 – the Today presenter Justin Webb asked: “Are we one nation when it comes to food, or do we have marked regional tastes, with the more exotic foods enjoyed in the wicked fleshpots of London perhaps and the rest of us sticking to steak ’n’ chips?”
If Webb sounded tentative, little wonder. Because never has this perceived taste gap between, say, Manchester and London, sounded more outdated. If not Ottolenghi’s chargrilled squash with brussels sprout salsa, home cooks up north – like many of the region’s chefs – are likely to be cooking something equally interesting for their tea tonight. In fact, referring to it as tea, not dinner, may be one of the few true north-south food divides that still exists.
Of course, there is a distinctive northern cooking tradition: a repertoire of dishes such as Lancashire hotpot and potted Morecambe Bay shrimps that grew out of a specific climate, the abundance of key ingredients and the physical demands put on an industrial workforce – what, in France, they would call terroir.
Poorly paid, hard graft demanded pie and mushy peas, black pudding, tripe, liver and onions, Cumberland sausage and plenty of cheap carbs on the table at every meal. That is why the north has such a range of subtly different breads: stotties, oven bottoms, barm cakes.
Naturally, you can still eat pease pudding in Newcastle, pasty and black peas in Bolton, dripping-cooked fish and chips in Yorkshire (tip: try 149 in Bridlington). These foods echo down the ages. Although, significantly, many such delicacies have needed to be revived from near extinction. Nigel Haworth, chef-owner of the Michelin-starred Northcote near Blackburn, whose Ribble Valley Inns group does a fine line in toad-in-the-hole and sticky toffee pudding (a Cumbrian invention), is one of a number of high-profile chefs who have helped the north rediscover its historic dishes.
Whatever their current popularity, however, those traditional northern dishes exist happily within a wider food culture that is as globalised and open to new ideas as any on the planet. Are exotic ingredients as readily available up north as they are in London, the Today programme asked Ottolenghi? As he pointed out, Tesco sells pomegranate seeds, so obviously they are. But in many different, fragmented ways, such cross-cultural pollination has been going on up north for decades. The Chinatowns in Manchester and Liverpool, the curry hotspots in Bradford and Rusholme, and the food shopping available around them, have always exerted a cosmopolitan influence on the region. I have a mate whose mum used to regularly cook okra curries in the 1980s. That was rare, but it was happening.
True, up until very recently, in terms of its dynamism, diversity and providing reliable quality, the northern restaurant scene lagged way behind London, and the capital still kickstarts trends in the way that the north is only just beginning to. However, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool are catching up fast. From the headline-generating Michelin ambitions of, for instance, Manchester House or the French, to superlative “dude food” (Honest Crust or Dough Boys’ pizzas; Patty Smith’s or Free State Kitchen’s burgers), we lack nothing, and are beginning to innovate concepts – most notably, the marriage of Gujarati food and craft beer at Leeds’ Bundobust – which are setting the bar nationally.
The reasons why are complex, but a new, knowledgeable and enthusiastic generation of diners up north is now fuelling a mini restaurant boom. Credible London independents are expanding northwards (Hawksmoor, Manchester; MeatLiquor, Leeds), and even in something as relatively niche as tapas – Lunya and Salt House in Liverpool, the forthcoming Iberica and El Gato Negro in Manchester – the region now has a choice of restaurants as authentic as anything in Soho.
In fact, rather than a north-south divide, the bigger issue may soon become one of bland repetition. Historically, pop culturally, Britain’s cities tended to have USPs – in music, the arts, football, nightlife – but increasingly they look like interchangeable, clean-cut hubs of bright, shiny consumption (usually of food and drink). We may be eating better, but in the process are we losing local colour?

Top 10 French delicacies

There is more to French food than croissants and steaks. Charles Timoney reveals 10 treats to try on your holiday in France this summer

Tarte tatin ... created when an apple tart was inadvertently put into the baking dish upside down. Photograph: Owen Franken/Corbis

1. Boulette d'Avesnes

When the cheese trolley arrives look closely and, if you are lucky, you may spot, lurking near the back, a Boulette d'Avesnes. It is easy to recognise as it is one of the few pyramidal ones, and certainly the only reddish one. It may very probably be the only one on the trolley which hasn't had a slice cut out of it. There is a good reason for this as we are dealing with the surprise symphony of French cheeses. It tastes stronger and spicier than almost any other cheese. It is actually delicious, once you have got used to its taste, especially if you wash it down with a glass of strong dark beer, preferably one from the north of France where the Boulette originates.
Where to try
The family-run Fromagers de France, 39 rue de Bretagne, 75003 Paris.

2. Café gourmand

This is quite a recent idea, which you mainly come across in steak houses or fish restaurants that are part of a chain. You have enjoyed your "entrée + plat" but you don't really have enough room for a huge pudding, even though you fancy something sweet and chocolaty. Cottoning on to this, the restaurants have come up with the brilliant "café gourmand". The word gourmand doesn't relate to the coffee itself - it will just be the regular, small black expresso. The gourmand bit is what comes with the coffee - an artistic array of miniature puddings. You generally get three: a mini triangle of brownie, an eggcup-sized crème brûlée and a taste of something like clafoutis.
Where to try
Steak house chains Hippopotamus which can be found throughout France.

3. Soupe de poisson

I have always had a soft spot for French dishes with a do-it-yourself element, and "soupe de poisson" is one that has a pleasingly high DIY content. It is a dish of orangey-coloured soup, accompanied by little dish of small slices of very crisp toast and a little bowl of "rouille". You can spread some rouille - a garlic-based spicy sauce - on a piece of toast and then dunk the resulting spicy toast in the soup and eat it. Alternatively, you can drop the spicy toast in the soup and then spoon it out again later. A final option is to drop the toast in the soup and then spoon in a bit of the rouille. You then eat the soup with the occasional spoonful tasting strongly of garlic and spice.
Where to try
Fish restaurant La Criée, which can be found throughout France.

4. Canard

The presence of sugar lumps in close proximity to coffee leads to one of the many excellent reasons for going to France – dunking sugar lumps in strong, black coffee is absolutely wonderful. The act of dunking a sugar lump, preferably a large, oblong one, in a cup of coffee is known as "faire un canard" where "canard", as you know, normally means "duck". It is quite common, where several people are gathered around cups of coffee, for a person, who hasn't asked for their own cup, to pick up a sugar lump and lean over towards someone else's cup asking "Je peux faire un canard?" (Can I do the duck?). They thus get a kick of sugary caffeine without having to drink a whole cup.
Where to try
Café de Phares, place de la Bastille 4th, Paris.

5. Tarte tatin

Spare a thought for Stéphanie and Caroline Tatin, two sisters who, in 1888 in their restaurant in Lamotte-Beuvron, accidentally created a gastronomic masterpiece: la Tarte Tatin. According to legend, in the lunchtime rush in the kitchens, an apple tart was inadvertently put into the baking dish upside down and then put into the oven to cook. Being upside down, the apples became all golden and slightly caramelised. In order to hide their mistake, the sisters served portions of the tart with a large dollop of cream on the top. This is how it is served to this day and it is absolutely wonderful.
Where to try
Patisserie Lenotre, 44 rue d'Auteuil, 75016 Paris.

6. Trou Normand

This is a wonderful thing that can transform a heavy meal. It can leave a feeling of wellbeing where there might otherwise have been indigestion. In the more expensive restaurants, when you are in the middle of a long and extravagant meal, the waiter will arrive unexpectedly with a small glass containing a refreshing mix of sorbet and alcohol. This is a "Trou Normand" and generally comprises apple or lemon sorbet swimming in a generous shot of Calvados. It doesn't always feature on the menu but just appears at exactly the moment you are ready for it. Somehow, the mix of tangy sorbet and strong alcohol revives you from your food-and-drink-induced stupor and sets you up for the following courses.
Where to try
La Tour d'Argent, 15-17, quai de la Tournelle, Paris 75005 (if budget is no obstacle!). Also, slightly less expensive would be Le Meurice, 228 rue de Rivoli, 1st, Paris.

7. Le quignon

One of the basic rules of French culture is the rigidly applied law which states that any person buying a baguette is obliged to eat the end of the loaf at some point between the boulangerie door and his place of residence. Failure to do so risks serious punishment. Happily, no one has discovered what the punishment is because it is actually impossible to carry a freshly baked baguette for more than seven metres without breaking off the end and eating it. Eating the end of the loaf – le quignon – is so irresistible that, if you are planning to go off on your own to buy the bread every day of your holiday, it is probably a good idea to try and convince your household that the loaves are actually sold by the baker without the ends on them.
Where to try
Au Panetier, 10 pl des Petits-Peres, 75002, Paris.

8. Café et tartines beurrées

Rather than order the classic combination of a croissant with your café au lait when you have breakfast in a French café, order "une tartine beurée" instead. Such tartines are made from a thinner loaf than a baguette called "une flute" which is cut lengthways and generously buttered. Two such tartines and a big cup of coffee will start the day off nicely and keep you going until lunchtime. It is not obligatory to dunk your tartine in your coffee, but you very probably will.
Where to try
Café de Phares, place de la Bastille 4th, Paris.

9. Chouquettes

Another relatively unknown wonder to be found in any French boulangerie. And what's more, they are very cheap. Chouquettes are chou pastry balls, the size of a plum, which are topped off with some little chunks of sugar. As they are hollow, they are very light, but taste delicious. Also, as they are sold by weight you get quite a lot for your money. Calling for "100 grammes de chouquettes, s'il vous plaït" will get you a paper bag with eight chouquettes and cost you about €1.60 (£1).
Where to try
Patisserie Lenotre, 44 rue d'Auteuil, 75016 Paris.

10. Religieuse au chocolat

A chocolate éclair, only more so. When you go into a boulangerie or a patisserie, rather than buying a simple chocolate éclair try a religieuse au chocolat. A religieuse is easy to spot because it is made up of two round éclair-like parts, a little one stuck on top of a larger one. It looks a bit like a child's snowman, only covered in chocolate icing and topped off with a swirl of cream. Religieuses are perfect to share - though of course you are faced with the problem of who gets which part. If chocolate is not your thing, they even occasionally come in a mix where one part has chocolate and the other coffee flavoured icing.
Where to try
Patisserie Lenotre, 44 rue d'Auteuil, 75016 Paris.
· Pardon My French: Unleash Your Inner Gaul
by Charles Timoney is published on August 2 (Penguin) £7.99

Roast chicken in cider with shallots, pancetta and peas with fondant potatoes

From hob, to oven, to table, Helen Graves introduces the clever Tefal Ingenio range with this cider-spiked twist on roast chicken

The Tefal Ingenio range offers cooks the ultimate in cooking versatility Photograph: PR

Helen Graves’s passion for food consumes every aspect of her life. Despite being in the midst of a PhD in psychology, Graves is the author of two successful food blogs and three cookbooks, with a fourth under way. Her Food Stories blog, inspired by her eating adventures in Peckham, won a food writing award at the Young British Foodies in 2013, and she recently launched her own jerk chicken marinade (after six years’ exhaustive testing), which she sells through her blog.

Cooking is at the heart of her incredibly busy life, so when it comes to kitchen equipment, Graves is a big believer in versatility. She’s recently switched to the Tefal Ingenio range and has been impressed at how it’s helped streamline the cooking process: “I love being able to cook on the hob and then transfer a pan directly to the oven with no fuss – it makes so much sense.”

Here, she demonstrates the range’s benefits with a delicious one-pot roast chicken made entirely in a frying pan.

Roast chicken in cider with shallots, pancetta and peas with fondant potatoes

For the chicken
2 tbsp olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, finely sliced
100g pancetta, cubed
20 shallots, peeled but left whole
2 sprigs of rosemary
500ml dry cider
1.5kg chicken
150g fresh peas
2 heaped tbsp crème fraîche
For the potatoes
150ml olive oil
600g potatoes
1 fat clove of garlic
2 sprigs of rosemary
Equipment
28cm frying pan
16cm and 20cm saucepans
(serves 4)
1 Preheat the oven to 180C (355F). Heat the olive oil in the frying pan and fry the garlic and pancetta for a couple of minutes. Add the shallots and rosemary sprigs, and continue to fry until the shallots colour. Move the shallots to the pan edges and place the chicken in the centre, seasoning the skin well. Carefully pour the cider around the chicken and then transfer to the oven. Wait until the pan is safely on the oven shelf before removing the handle.
2 Roast chicken for 1 hr 15 mins, or until the juices run clear. Stir the shallots occasionally during the cooking process, to ensure even colour.
3 About half an hour before the chicken is ready, pour the olive oil for the potatoes into the 20cm saucepan and add the aromatics. Heat gently, adding the potatoes so they fit snugly in the base of the pan. Place the lid on the pan and cook over a medium heat for around 30 minutes or until the potatoes are tender, shaking frequently to ensure they cook evenly.
4 When the chicken is ready, attach the handle and remove the pan from the oven. Transfer the chicken to a board, cover with foil and leave to rest.
5 Cook the peas in a pan of salted boiling water until tender. Return sauce to the heat and simmer until it reduces slightly. Stir in 2 heaped tablespoons of crème fraîche and the peas, and season well. Carve the chicken and serve with the sauce and potatoes.