Category Archives: Eating In

Andrew Polmear, Eating In, Features, Uncategorized

A passion for appassimento

We’re still in lockdown. It’s cold. There’s snow on the ground. Let’s go to southern Italy and talk about wine.

About two years ago, I was introduced by a friend to a wine, currently available at Waitrose for under £10 (sometimes well under £10), that has become one of our favourite weekday wines. It’s made by a firm called Terre di Faiano which is based in Chianti but they have vineyards in Southern Italy and Sicily.

The grape is Primitivo, the same grape as Zinfadel in the USA, and it’s from Puglia. It’s extraordinarily full-bodied, creamy smooth, and unlike almost any other Italian wine I’ve tasted.

For two years I’ve puzzled over how this wine comes to be so good and only discovered the answer when Waitrose put another wine on the shelf alongside it. This is also by Terre di Faiano but the grape is Nero d’Avola and it’s from Sicily. And the giveaway is that on the label it mentions appassimento. The penny dropped. Perhaps the Primitivo is made the same way, I wondered, and a look at Waitrose’ website shows that it is.

What is appassimento? It means ‘dried up’ or ‘tired out’. The basic principles of winemaking are pretty standard: once ripe, the grapes are pressed, the juice is put into some sort of container and left to ferment, then bottled, sometimes after spending some months or years in oak casks. But if the wine is made by the appassimento method the grapes are left to dry before starting the whole process. They used to be left out in the sun on a bed of straw, which is why it’s called in English ‘straw wine’. The purpose is to increase the sugar content of the grapes and reduce the water content. The resulting wines are more alcoholic or sweet or both, a deeper red and packed with flavour.

They’ve been making wine like this since the Ancient World. Hesiod (he’s the one who was roughly contemporary with Homer but less grand, more personal) described it in around 700 BCE and it’s been used in Sicily and Puglia for centuries. But the most famous wine to use it is in northern Italy, just north of Verona, where the local wines tend to be thin and bitter. Amarone della Valpolicella is made this way. It gives a red wine of extraordinary power, nearer to a port than to an ordinary Valpolicella, which can be thin and bitter. Just to complete the northern Italian story, they even keep the lees left after draining off the fermented Amarone and pour ordinary Valpolicella wine on top. There follows a second fermentation and you get another beefy wine that’s called Ripasso (‘re-passed’ in English) though less full-bodied, and much cheaper, than Amarone. Finally, the winemakers may deliberately leave enough sugar unfermented to make it sweet. It’s called Recioto and the Italians drink it at the end of the meal.

I’ve had other wines from Puglia made by the appassimento method and I’ve found them too much. The heaviness is overdone, the flavours too ‘jammy’. The Terre di Faiano from Sicily is a bit that way, to my taste, although it gets great customer reviews. It’s made with the Nero d’Avola grape which has no trouble making dark, robust wine without the need to dry the grapes. But somehow, with the Primitivo from Puglia the winemakers seem to have hit the spot. I plan to get a good supply in before this article goes to press!

Brighton Life, Eating In, Eating Out, Features, Gull About Town

Gull About Town

Gallery

Our new regular feature looking into what’s new in food and drink

SWOOPING INTO Jubilee Square, the Gull has sniffed the air and discovered a little Singapore-style hawker experience at the back of The Chilli Pickle. Those clever Sperrings, Alun and Dawn who brought their off-road family adventures in India to Brighton 11 years ago, have always loved a shrimp krupuk with plum sauce and black pepper lamb ribs and trialled Hawkerman as a pop-up to make the most of their space in the restaurant. And they’ve done it well; West Hillers will remember their Chilli Pickle pop up at the Polygon on Seven Dials in 2017. And despite an October launch ahead of an inevitable lockdown, this little toe dip in the rough waters of hospitality has gone down swimmingly with the local as Brighton’s spice lovers took advantage of the double take-away option from Jubilee Square’s Asian one-stop shop. 

THE GULL LOVES nothing better than rummaging around in the bins of West Hill on a Friday night and has been tucking into some rather exotic flavours from the newly arrived Dishoom, the Irani-Bombay experience so beloved by our London cousins. It’s only available via Deliveroo so far, but the menu is as top notch and includes plenty for vegans and vegetarians such as the Pau Bhaji, much-loved Mattar Paneer, Jackfruit Biryani, samosas and bowls of chole. It even delivers drinks – Bombay sodas, Limca and Thums Up alongside Dishoom’s Mango Lassi.  And the Gull is happy to report all the packaging is made from reclaimed and renewable sugar cane pulp packaging and carbon-neutral PLA (a smart compostable bioplastic made from plants), are recyclable once rinsed or compostable. And each take away is matched with the donation of a meal through Akshaya Patra, a charity in India which offers free school meals to hungry children. 

https://delivery.dishoom.com.

RIDING THE THERMALS towards Shoreham Port, the Gull has got wind of a new kitchen opening next summer. The Port Kitchen will be next to the lock gates at the award-winning Lady Bee Enterprise Centre and plans to serve visitors as they pass through the locks, as well as the Port’s thriving business community and tourists visiting the area. It seems that the council has a plan to make this hitherto industrial space into an iconic food destination with proper coffee, fresh food and, take it from a bird, unparalleled views across the harbour. 

Brighton Life, Eating In, Eating Out, Features

Ready to snap into a new life

Gallery

“It’s not what you get with Deliveroo”, Red Snapper’s Pam and Philippe tell Gilly Smith

Panwad (Pam) ManeeTapho and her Belgian husband Philippe Ghenet are sitting at a table as the early autumn sunlight pours into the Red Snapper, until lockdown one of the most popular restaurants in Seven Dials. They’re talking about their plans to expand it into a casual lunch stop, a couple of tables outside and three inside. It’s all suitably distanced, which will add to the transformation of the busy buzzy evening eatery. 

The restaurant, which has always been a celebration of the fresh seafood and herb-flavoured dishes from their eastern Thailand home, has been replaced by a shop where customers can browse through the restaurant’s silver starter plates, the stacks of gluten-free fish sauce and Thai ginger shots stacked on the upcycled shelving. An orange 1977 Honda Novio scooter is the centrepiece, a cool, vintage reminder of where Red Snapper comes from. 

“That’s my mum’s” says Pam. The couple plan to use it for deliveries. “Imagine that turning up outside your door”, Philippe smiles. “It’s not what you get with Deliveroo.” 

Red Snapper is a triumph of creativity and lockdown lateral thinking. “We saw it coming” says Philippe who grew up in Italy and heard from relatives there what COVID was already doing to its economy. “It’s the end of the world, right? In a way it was like, come on guys, this is Nostradamus!”

At first, the couple held their heads in their hands, but they quickly realised that lock-down could give them time to think about what they really wanted from their life. “After 16 years of  working in the restaurant, sweeping, cooking, cleaning, it was spinning so fast that sometimes we didn’t have time to stop and think which way we want to channel the business”, says Pam who with her younger sister has worked with her parents in the restaurant since she was 16. “Four months of lockdown made us think, think, think, write down, plan, plan, plan. Which path are we going to take?” For them, it was always about the food. “We know what our customers like and what we can offer,” says Pam.  It’s the quality of the food. The flowery stuff, the service, the music, the smells, the incense, the candles… it all comes after.” 

They decided to offer the best take-away experience they could; while Pam and her father, Turmphan cook downstairs, Philippe chats to their customers upstairs, telling his stories and charming them with his laid-back style. “I like it this way. We’re done by 9pm and I can watch a movie with my son.” 

They first shared a flat when Philippe had just graduated in Media at Brighton University and Pam was studying Art, Design & Fashion at Northbrooke College, and they’ve spent months using their creativity, repurposing items from home for this cool, new look. “That was where we stored our linens,” says Philippe pointing to the beautifully battered vintage suitcase now housing an old set of scales and a pink neon heart light. “We choose to be our own bosses, so we might as well add our identity.”

He sees Red Snapper as a Thai market-style café. “Maybe you’re coming back from town; Churchill Square is closed but you still want to have a coffee”, he says. “We like to be a bit of a community market where you can pop in and get some ginger tea. Or maybe just a take-away.” 

As we sit in the late summer sunshine, nine-year-old Finlay is on his second day back at school and Pam and Philippe are feeling philosophical. As working owners, school is an essential part of the child-care, hence the move to daytime food which will reflect the ethos of the original Snapper; accessible, but made in-house from scratch. 

“We offer passion” says Pam. “This is our career, our life. Before COVID we were too busy, we had too much to lose. We might as well shape the life that we want.” 

Andrew Polmear, Eating In

Just close your eyes…

…and you could be there. Andrew Polmear takes us to windswept, rugged Corbières for a fine glass of cool Castelmaure 

I don’t usually recommend specific bottles of wine, being more interested in writing about the principles behind why we enjoy drinking. And I’m especially interested in relating how a wine tastes to where it comes from, who makes it and what they do to it that makes it special. But there’s a bottle available as I write that illustrates those principles so well that I’m breaking my rule. It’s Les Hauts de Castelmaure 2018, from the Corbières in France and Majestic has it for £11.99. If they’ve sold out, the Scottish wine merchant Exel will post you a case for not much more.

I found out about it because Decanter magazine recently published the results of a tasting of 55 Corbières reds and the Castelmaure came equal top with 95 points out of 100. That’s the sort of score Bordeaux wines selling for over £30 a bottle would be pleased to have. The tasters found it rich and powerful with an aroma of black fruits, fine leather and soft spice. 

The Corbières is that windswept, rugged part of France between Narbonne and the Pyrenees bordering the Mediterranean coast. It’s dotted with ruined castles where the last of the Cathars held out against persecution in the 13th century and they’ve been making wine there since the Romans. The village of Embrès-et-Castelmaure is perched on a hilly plateau just 22 miles in from the sea. That’s the first clue as to why their wine is special. It’s so hot in the Corbières that it’s easy to make bland, blousy wine with grapes that have ripened too quickly. Castelmaure’s altitude in the foothills of the Serre mountain keeps them that bit cooler. 

The second clue is that the vineyards are steep and the soil arid – hopeless conditions for making lots of cheap wine, prefect for
wine of quality. The grapes have to be picked by hand and the
yield is inevitably low. And, to ensure that none of the wine growers aims for quantity rather than quality, the Co-op pays by the size of the vineyard, not by the weight of grapes grown. A low yield means that the flavours are concentrated.

Which brings us to the third clue: all wine made under the Castelmaure label (and there are cheaper Castelmaure wines than this one) comes from the village Co-operative: it’s what the village does. It helps that the actual winemaker, Bernard Pueyo, who has been there since 1983, is passionate about what he does. As he says on the label, the Co-op prefers to make wine with the flavours of the local “garrigue” rather than bother with the flim-flam (the word he uses in French is “falbalas”) of professional experts.

Then there’s the detail of how the wine is made. At least half of the grapes are fermented by carbonic maceration. This means the grapes are not crushed but allowed to break open as they ferment. It gives more flavour to the wine, especially with Carignan; and 20% of the grapes of this wine are Carignan, the rest being Syrah and Grenache. Then the wine is aged for 11 months in small oak barrels (“barriques”) as in Bordeaux. I don’t find that the wine tastes of oak (that’s an unmistakable vanilla flavour) but it’s the oak that permits the development of those flavours of leather and spice. 

Why have I gone into such detail? Because I find that understanding all those points adds hugely to my enjoyment of this gorgeous, rich and complex wine.

Eating In, Features, The Arts

Lockdown Reads: Cooking The Books

After a couple of months of Lockdown, even the view across Devil’s Dyke and a low tide beach at sunset might be wearing thin. Time then to pop over to Provence, or maybe down to Devon? In Cooking the Books podcast, I’ve curated some of the latest foodiest reads for you.  I talk to the authors about the food that takes us to Provence in Jo Thomas’ Escape to the French Farmhouse,  a 1950’s Scarborough summer in Benjamin Myers’ The Offing, downtown Chicago in Sara Paretsky’s Dead Land and 1600’s Norway in Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s Sunday Times Bestseller, The Mercies.  Joanne Harris takes us to her fictional Lansquenet -sous-Tannes for her latest in the Chocolat series, The Strawberry Thief and Veronica Henry is in Devon for A Wedding at the Beach Hut.

 

 

 

Gilly Smith

 

Click here to listen

 

Andrew Polmear, Brighton Life, Eating In, Features

Wine to go with cheese

Most of us are finding ourselves eating at home a lot more than in pre-Covid-19 times. In my household it means we eat a lot more cheese than usual, since we consider a cheese course an important part of a proper meal at home. With the cheese it’s very tempting to continue drinking whatever wine we’ve already opened. I think we can do better than that. Here are my thoughts.

When it comes to wine that goes with cheese, it’s got to be red. The only exception is a heavy sweet wine, like Sauternes, that goes wonderfully with very tasty blue cheeses. Roquefort is the usual example. That aside, any red will do, although in principle the stronger the cheese the more powerful the wine. Red is good but it’s not perfect.

To move up a notch we have to go to fortified wines. A dry austere Amontillado sherry is thrilling with any cheese, although it will dwarf a mild cheese, for which you might try a Fino. For those who get confused by the different types of sherry, remember that sherry is made at first like any white wine, but then left in barrels open to the air. If the wine develops a creamy layer of yeast on top, called flor, it becomes a Fino – dry, light in colour with a sharp yeasty tang. If the flor dies off or is killed off by adding alcohol, the wine is exposed to air and darkens, developing that distinctive, austere, almost bitter, nutty flavour with overtones of tobacco and spices from the oak barrel.  That’s an Amontillado. An Oloroso, that’s an even darker sherry which never had flor on top, would be marvellous too, but it, too, must be bone dry. They are much harder to find. Don’t use sweet sherry, not even anything with the word “cream” in the title. Save that for the pudding.

Equally wonderful would be a Tawny Port, again because it’s got that austere dry nutty, leathery tang. Ruby port wouldn’t do. It hasn’t been oxidised so it has a rich fruity flavour that goes with fruity puddings but not cheese. Ruby port is either matured in huge barrels or in tanks or even in the bottle. Tawny ports start off like ruby ports but spend longer – much longer – in much smaller barrels, slowly oxidising, turning brown and leathery, losing all that fruitiness but developing that spicy, nutty, leathery essence.

If we were really celebrating I’d ask for a glass of Madeira. Malmsey is my favourite but I’d settle for any of them. It’s not unlike port in the way it’s made but it’s from a different grape, different terroir and, unlike port, it’s gently heated while oxidising. Like port it needs to be at least 10 years old; then it’s heavenly.

But how can anyone manage to drink wine with the meal and a fortified wine with the cheese? The secret is to stick to small amounts. You only need a mouthful of the fortified wine. Then put the stopper back on and keep it somewhere cool. That way you’ll stay within your 14 units a week. And the joy of these fortified wines is they will last for months once opened. After all, at Downton Abbey they sit for years in decanters on the sideboard without going off.

Andrew Polmear

Eating In, Eating Out, Features

The Flour Pot

When the Flour Pot café in Seven Dials was forced into lockdown at the end of March, there was little warning. Like the rest of the city’s hospitality industry, its team had to think quickly. Loulou Tamadon-Nejad is the communications manager at Flour Pot’s seven stores across Brighton; ‘Overnight, we had to come up with a new model’, she said. ‘We still had our vans and our drivers, so we realised that we could quickly change to a home delivery service while still selling bread, pastries and essentials such as milk, butter and eggs for customers willing to queue to buy them through the window.’  As friends and neighbours faced going out of business, Loulou and her team offered to sell and deliver their goods too. You can now buy flowers from Gunn’s the Florist, Smors hummus, cheese from the Cheeseman and Curing Rebels charcuterie from your local Flour Pot cafes.

But it wasn’t just its own survival that The Flour Pot was thinking about; it is part of a city-wide campaign to feed Brighton’s hospital staff via the Facebook page, Brighton & Hove NHS Food Bank which coordinates local food and drink businesses as well as individuals in feeding the health workers on the front line of COVID-19. Its recent fundraiser, Brighton and Hove Feed the NHS aimed to raise £5,000 when it launched in early April with prizes worth over £10,000 including a cocktail masterclass and chef-cooked meals at the winner’s home, but smashed its goal by 322% with over £16,000 donated in just one week. By the beginning of May, they had raised nearly £40,000 which now provides 4 meals a day to the Royal Sussex in Brighton and the Princess Royal in Haywards Heath.

Set up in March by Simon Livermore from Hove and Seven Dials resident Petra Exton, the Brighton & Hove NHS Foodbank began by providing food and groceries to NHS staff during the battle against Coronavirus. But it quickly attracted the attention of the Brighton Restaurants Association and its members and now delivers four delicious meals 24 hours a day to the front-line Critical Care team at the Royal Sussex County Hospital (RSCH) in Brighton and the Princess Royal in Haywards Heath, a total of 4,300 meals a day.

Founder of the Brighton & Hove NHS Foodbank, Simon Livermore said: ‘It started off as a nice idea to send basics like rice and beans to staff who were suddenly too busy to eat, but ity seemed like everyone wanted to do something.’ Simon and Petra also realised that accepting offers from local restaurants would be a way of keeping them in the public eye during lockdown at what seemed an impossible time for the industry; ‘Nurses were telling me that they’d love their burrito bowls with fresh salsa from La Choza or a curry from Easy Tiger so much that they’d order a take-away from there on their night off’ said Petra ‘It was a way of helping both NHS frontline staff by feeding them amazing food and supporting local businesses.’

Simon and Petra have been overwhelmed by the love shown on the Facebook page; ‘I’ve shed tears on many occasions,’ said Simon. ‘This is not just about putting food in their bellies. It’s about morale.’

 

Gilly Smith

Nurse from the Royal Sussex tucks into a BagelMan bagel