New York deli-style lunch ideas

If there’s one country that knows how to make a sandwich, it’s the US of A. New York is the sandwich capital of the world, and while many New Yorkers may not take much of a lunch break, they do know a thing or two about a lunchtime takeaway. With this in mind, here are a few NYC deli-inspired lunches.
• Make yourself some speedy, healthier, pizza slices. Try chickpea-flour bases: gradually whisk an equal volume of water into gram flour. Add a pinch of salt and any herbs you wish, then leave to stand. Then fry in butter on both sides in a nonstick pan until golden. Finish with any toppings you wish – pesto, roasted or raw veg, ham and creme fraiche... and grill.

• Nothing beats a good bagel and nowadays, brands like the New York Bakery Co are ubiquitous. Prepare and toast a bagel at work, ideally. Otherwise, pack it ready-to-eat tightly in Tupperware rather than foil or clingfilm. Cream cheese is a classic starting point, but needs some robust flavours to counter all that creamy sweetness: try topping with capers, thinly sliced red onion, tomato and lots of freshly ground black pepper. Or try our friend Olivia’s delicious and simple mackerel paté: mash cream cheese with smoked mackerel, a squeeze of lemon juice and zest, chopped parsley and lots of pepper. Pack into a small Tupperware, and refrigerate when you get to work, unless you want to incur your colleagues’ wrath. Spread on your – preferably warm – bagel at lunch. A couple of slices of dill pickle would not go amiss.
• You may not have access to a store like Satriale’s, but you can still make an Italian sub (or “hoagie”) that Tony Soprano wouldn’t sniff at. Whisk together 1 tsp olive oil, 1 tsp red wine vinegar, ½ tsp dijon mustard and a pinch of dried oregano. Split a submarine roll, discard any excess crumbs (keep for breadcrumbs) and sprinkle the dressing over both halves. Lay a couple of slices of gouda or emmental on the bottom, then top with a selection of sliced cured meat (mortadella and salami are our faves, but go wild with whatever you can find in the sliced meat aisle). Whatever you choose, be generous. Top with shredded iceberg, thinly sliced red onion, and sliced jarred sweet peppers or olives. Close and wrap in a tight bodybag of greaseproof paper secured with a couple of elastic bands.
• If you work carefully and finish the assembly at work, a luxury hotdog will make you the envy of your colleagues. Cook a baguette in a hot oven alongside your sausages. Meanwhile mix plenty of mustard and paprika into the contents of half a tin of beans, then pack in a small microwaveable container. When the baguette is cooked, take out some of the middle, spread with a layer of mayonnaise and pop in your sausages for safekeeping until lunch (wrap the whole thing in foil). Thinly slice some spring onion and red chilli. Pack in a container. Come lunchtime, place your hotdog baguette folded open on a plate, and heat the beans in a microwave until piping hot. Pour over your sandwich and finish with the spring onion and chilli.

Tapioca: the hated school pudding makes a culinary comeback

Fish eyes, frogspawn or eyeball pudding – synonyms for Britain’s most hated school pudding, tapioca. Loathed by the older generation, and largely unknown by the younger, milky tapioca pudding’s bad rep, and the dish itself, has all but faded into obscurity. “Lots of people associate tapioca with boarding school or school dinners,” says Brett Graham, head chef at The Ledbury, “but that tends to be the older generation, so things are changing”.
Graham, who grew up in Australia, is just one of a growing cohort of celebrated chefs elevating tapioca beyond bowls of milky gloop. It turns up in sweet and savoury forms at his two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Notting Hill. He’s far from alone - chefs around the world love it. At The French Laundry in California, Thomas Keller serves it with oysters, the small pearls suspended in an oyster-infused sabayon; Michel Roux Jr cooks tapioca in squid ink and teams it with calamari and garlic butter at Le Gavroche. In his São Paulo restaurant, DOM, Brazilian chef Alex Atala serves tapioca pearls in a sharp manioc-root extract tucupi with giant river fish pirarucu. Heston Blumenthal used tapioca flour, masquerading as sand, in his seafood ensemble Sound of the Sea.
But it’s not just the preserve of michelin-starred chefs. Tapioca starch, extracted from manioc (cassava), is sold in a number of guises, from flour to flakes, pearls of varying sizes, and precooked “instant” tapioca. It’s cheap, too – around £1 for a 500g bag of pearl – and it’s a staple in many cuisines. In Brazil, it’s an everyday ingredient, savoured in bite-sized cheese breads (pão de queijo), as puffed biscoito globo crisps, boiled up with red wine, sugar, clove and cinnamon as sagu de tapioca, or melted into crepes (beiju) that are stuffed with everything from sun-dried beef, to coconut and condensed milk.
As Atala points out, tapioca is used a lot in Asia, “and so Europeans know it as an Asian ingredient,” having made its way east from Brazil with the Portuguese in the Age of Discovery. In India, sabudana (tapioca pearls) are boiled up with sweetened milk in a pudding that was perhaps the precursor to our milk pudding. Or mixed with potatoes, peanuts and spices in sabudana vada (fried dumplings) or sabudana ni khichdi – a popular sautéed dish on fast days in Gujarat and other Northern Indian states. Tapioca flour is also used to make crispy papad and coconut rolls (puttu) in Malayali cuisine.
“In Thailand, tapioca is used for thickening sauces, and to make a few desserts,’” says Thai chef Yui Sriyabhaya, who describes a handful of desserts all made with coconut milk, palm-sugar syrup and tapioca in varying forms, such as the fat worms of boiled tapioca dough in krong kraeng, or the green (dyed with pandan leaves) tapioca jelly matchsticks in lod chong Singapore.
Marina Pipatpan, Thai chef-owner of São Paulo restaurant Tian, remembers growing up in Thailand with similar desserts that mix saku (tapoioca pearls), syrup and coconut milk with black beans (saku tua dtam) or crunchy corn kernels (saku kao pod). “My favourite is an ancient dish that’s still popular to this day – saku sai moo. We cook ground pork with sugar and add peanuts and make a ball that we then wrap in tapioca pearls and steam,” she enthuses. Similar dumplings and desserts can be found in other Southeast Asian cuisines, including Korea, Indonesia and China. Not to mention Taiwan, the country that started the craze for bubble tea in the 1980s, with western youth en masse slurping up shiny tapioca pearls through fat straws, and franchises making or breaking based on their ability to cook the pearls to perfection, between bouncy and chewy.
Tapioca is the perfect blank canvas; its capacity to hold colour, to absorb and release a burst of flavour (my favourite is tapioca pearls cooked in soy), and its versatile texture are exactly why chefs love it.
So how to get it right at home? “Cook it till you have just the tiniest pinprick of white left in the centre,” says chef Alyn Williams. “Tapioca pearls should be soft and silky.” For Brett Graham, the secret is in soaking the pearls in milk or stock first (the former for sweet and the latter for savoury), then rinsing them and cooking them in plenty of milk or stock, and rinsing again afterwards to remove any excess starch. Do you dare have a go? It’s time for tapioca’s domestic comeback.

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?