Tag Archive for: Noma

Hay ice cream, Lamb in hay – all down to my stable existence

Don’t be a pet shop boy (or girl) if you’re planning on cooking with hay. That’s my advice and for decades I’ve been sourcing the finest sweet meadow hay for the pot. Scents of herbs and wild flowers to the fore. Not what you get from dusty, mousy dried grass in a packet from the pet store. And, beware, urban dwellers, straw (nutritionally worthless cereal stalks) won’t do at all. Fit only for rabbit hutch bedding.

Of course, I‘m lucky enough to have always had access to top quality hay thanks to a horse-mad family and stable connections. The aromas of a Lamb Leg roasting in the stuff wafted enticingly from the Aga as I lifted it out to let it rest before serving. Tip: scrupulously remove every hay wisp before slicing.

Ever wondered about the origins of ‘never look a gift horse in the mouth’? It’s all about judging the age of a nag by its teeth. Culinary hay, in contrast is the gift that keeps on giving. From my leftover batch I whistled up Hay ice Cream, using Christoffer Hruskova’s fool-proof recipe (see below). The London-based baker is from Denmark – the Scandinavians have a particular affinity for hay-based cuisine, it seems. Back in the eight century the Vikings employed dried grass and leaves from birch trees to smoke and preserve meat and fish. In ancient Ireland, early settlers wrapped meats like a wild game in hay or straw before cooking in the ‘Fulacht Fiadh’, a cooking pit in use since the Bronze Age.

NOMA’s hay parfait
My hay ice cream with quinces

Plus ca change. Over a decade ago when Rene Redzepi’s NOMA restaurant first brought foodies flocking to Copenhagen hay was one of the less challenging staples. NOMA’s menu has offered a butter and hay parfait, hay cream with lingonberries, celeriac rubbed in hay ash before being baked in a salt crust pastry and, the pick, a dish of Jerusalem artichokes and truffles drizzled with toasted hay oil.

All this may have novelty value, but hay has recurrently been ‘rediscovered’ as a cooking mode over the centuries. In Historic Heston Blumenthal (2013) the gastronomic egghead  reveals the secrets of hay smoking. He wrote: “In the early days at The Fat Duck I use to wet hay, set light to it, then pack the charred remains around a leg of lamb before putting it in a salt crust and baking it, which added a wonderful farmyard flavour to the meat. Later I did something similar with calves’ sweetbreads and served them with chicken roasting juices and cockles.”

Later he progressed to hay smoking fish, placing halibut in a squirrel cage trap over a barbecue, dramatic flames ensuing yet producing a more delicate smokiness than a long slow process. Long-time Blumenthal acolyte Ashley Palmer Watts eventually became chef director at Dinner by HB at London’s Mandarin Oriental, where those historic dishes were showcased. Industry bible Staff Canteen attributed Hay-Smoked Mackerel, Lemon Salad and Gentleman’s Relish to him. The recipe is definitely on my bucket list.

Leaving culinary bliss aside, there is a sustainable advantage to cooking with a ‘hay box’. Conserving the heat you initially put into the pot and subsequent slow cooking is environmentally sound. Especially in those parts of the world where wood is scarce. Nearer home, hay box use was recommended to UK households as part of World War II rationing. My employment of hay today is purely sensuous. Here are recipes for Lamb Roasted in Hay and Hay Ice Cream.

LAMB IN HAY

Ingredients

  • 1kg lamb roasting joint
  • A few handfuls of hay
  • 125g butter, softened
  • A few sprigs rosemary, chopped (use thyme or a mixture of both if you wish, or try lavender)
  • 2 garlic cloves, crushed
  • Salt and pepper

Method

Preheat oven to 190°C/Gas 5. Soak the hay in water for about 15 minutes, then drain. In a bowl mix the butter, chopped herbs and garlic. Line a roasting tin large enough to take your meat joint with a layer of hay about 5cm thick. Place your lamb on the hay, then smear the lamb all over with the butter mixture. Season.

Cover the lamb with the rest of the hay. Then either cover with a lid if you have one for the tin or make one with a double layer of foil. Seal the foil all around the tin. Make sure there are no loose bits of hay emerging from the tin – it all needs to be contained so it does not smoulder or catch fire when cooking.

Roast in the oven for 30 minutes per 500g for a medium cooked roast (adjust for slightly pinker lamb if preferred). Remove from the oven and leave to stand for 15 minutes. Take off the lid, remove the lamb and carve. Use the juices from the pan for the gravy

HAY ICE CREAM

Ingredients

  • 50g fresh hay
  • 250ml double cream
  • 250ml whole milk
  • 90g of caster sugar
  • 6 egg yolks

Method

To start the infusion, mix the cream, milk and sugar in a medium sized pan. Bring the liquid to the boil so that the sugar dissolves. Stir the hot mixture in with the 6 egg yolks in a bowl to create a custard. Add the hay and leave aside for 30 minutes. Strain the liquid and place it back on the stove over a medium to high heat. Place a thermometer in the pan and bring the liquid slowly up to 76°C. Once the temperature has been reached, remove from the heat and allow the liquid to cool down in a bowl over ice. Churn in an ice cream maker until set and serve.

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Source yourself some reindeer brains – how to keep the Noma flame burning at home

It all sounds a mite deja vu Noma announcing 20 years on from its foundation it will soon be abandoning the formal restaurant concept that finally won it a third Michelin star in 2021. Adding to its cluster of World’s No.1 restaurant awards that focused the world’s eyes on the culinary wizard of Copenhagen, René Redzepi.

Didn’t that previous groundbreaker, El Bulli in Catalonia close its doors to customers a decade ago to mutate into a culinary research laboratory? The critical Sabatier knives were out then for the perceived pretension. Not everyone had bought into the refined spheres of ‘molecular gastronomy’ and the heavy-handed satire of recent movie The Menu is witness to continuing hostility to a fine dining world few of us can afford – or, when it comes to epic tasting menus, tolerate.

As with El Bulli the broadsheets were quick to react to the Noma ‘bombshell’ with ‘Is This There End for Fine Dining?’ headlines, Observer critic Jay Rayner wading in with ‘Twenty Six courses. £400 bills, artichoke creme brulee… I won’t miss super-luxe restaurants’.

He has got form for whacking bloated, exorbitant establishments, but Noma is a different beast despite its exclusivity. I remember a leaner Rayner lauding Redzepi in the same pages back in 2009 when he was viewed as a natural successor to super chefs Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal. Since when the Dane’s templates of foraging and fermentation have filtered down to absorb a whole generation of chefs.

It’s not even clear what form Noma 3.0 will take when it emerges at the end of 2024, the statement hinting “serving guests will still be a part” of a “Noma Projects’ experience that will not be a conventional restaurant. What is certain is that the team will decamp to Kyoto in Japan between March and May 2023. So Japanese influence looks certain. A previous sabbatical foray to the Yucatan in 2017, while the Copenhagen base relocated to include an urban farm, resulted in the swerve in direction that became Noma 2.0.

Simon Martin was along for that Mexican ride and the success of his Michelin-starred Mana in Manchester is proof the expensive tasting menu experience is not dead. I‘m a fan and last year I endorsed the multi-course extravaganza offered by Gareth Ward’s mighty Yynyshir. At both these places the waiting list stretches into the distance. Expect Noma now to be even harder to get into despite a dinner menu for its recent ‘game & forest season’ that cost £415 a head with an additional £214 for wine pairings or £154 for juice pairings. 

Or you could just buy the book, Noma 2.0: Vegetable, Forest, Ocean

Quite a stocking filler. 2.5kg is a lot of cookbook. Particularly for one without printed recipes. And ingredients you are unlikely to pick up at your local Waitrose. So what makes this magnum opus (Artisan, £60) my Food Book of 2022? Pipping very different, pleasurable tomes from Jeremy Lee and Debora Robertson, it is the polar opposite of their domestic charm. Lord Sauron to their Hobbit. Except, tenuously extending the Lord of The Rings conceit, it ultimately casts a near Elvish spell.

Beyond its extreme pictorial beauty there’s nothing approachable and immediately useful about this latest edict from the realm of Copenhagen’s Noma restaurant and its shape-shifting magus, Rene Redzepi. That may represent its true magic.

Regular readers of this blog will recall my (rewarding) travails tackling 2018’s Noma Guide to Fermentation. The new book is more a follow-up to Rene’s original mission statement, Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine (2010), tracing the literal journey that took Noma from derided obscurity to world’s best restaurant. Noma 2.0 records the leap forward, via a sabbatical that involved ‘cuckoo nesting ‘in Mexico, to a new custom-built site in the Danish capital with that radical fermentation lab to the fore, providing all the menu’s building blocks. Noma is relocating to Kyoto, Japan in spring 2023 and friends close to the operation tell me that might mark a radically different stage 3 in its restless evolution.

The story so far is captured by the remarkable photography of New York-based Ditte Isager, who is on back on board for the new book, more brilliant than ever. Her startling image of Blue Mussel and Quail Egg (above) represents an element in one of the three seasonal sections. Ocean reflects the menu for January to April. The others are Vegetable (May through August) and Forest (September through December) – teasing us with 200 dishes in all.

Noma 2.0 on its new site
Redzepi with his co-authors

Let Rene and his co-authors explain: “This book is a cookbook, but it is not necessarily meant to be cooked from. At Noma we constantly return to nature as a primary source of creative inspiration, however, creativity is a unique process for each individual. This book is meant to help catalyse that unique creative spark for each reader. If you do wish to recreate any of the dishes, there is a QR code in the book which will bring you to every detailed recipe exactly as they are used in the kitchen at Noma.

“It is about composing a plate that delights the eye as much as the palate, whether through the trompe l’oeil of a “flowerpot” chocolate cake or a dazzling mandala of flowers and berries. It is about pushing the boundaries of what we think we want to eat—a baby pinecone, a pudding made of reindeer brain—to open our palates with startling confidence.”

Let me quote one daunting dish description. It’s my promise to myself next year, aided by what lies through the QR portal to recreate Noma’s Wild Boar and Nasturtium. That’s ‘Forest’,  I’ll have hang fire until Fall. The journey starts when “nasturtium leaves are compressed with parsley oil, then folded over dots of gooseberry-coriander paste and smoked egg yolk paste to form nasturtium ravioli. 

“Chestnuts are cooked in smoked butter until crisp and caramelised, glazed in roasted kelp salt, peaso reduction and smoked seaweed shoyu, and then diced. Fermented wild boar belly is fried to brown its surface and then sliced. Smoked egg yolk paste is piped onto the boar slices, which are then topped with the diced roasted chestnuts and folded to enclose the fillings.

“Three fermented wild boar belly wraps are brushed with chestnut smoked butter and briefly grilled over charcoal. The belly wraps and one nasturtium raviolo are skewered with a blackcurrant wood skewer. The belly wraps are brushed with cep tamari and seasoned with ancho chilli paste, quince vinegar, salt and black pepper. The skewer is served on a hay plate with a wedge of Japanese quince.” 

Or maybe I’ll divert to the more straightforward Sikha Roast, one of many deer recipes, including Reindeer Brain Jelly or Reindeer Marrow Fudge or, gulp, Reindeer Penis Salad. Off-puttingly exotic? Definitely, but what shines through is the determination to make the most of whatever is local and seasonal and sensual. Here not just empty nods to fashion. And if it’s not our ‘local’ who cares? That’s no excuse not to buy an exquisitely beautiful volume for the foodie in your life.

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Roasted chicken wing garum – I put the Noma Book of Fermentation to the test

Wish me luck. I’m about to embark on recreating the Roasted Chicken Wing Garum that is a party piece at Noma in Copenhagen. I’m scaling down the portions required by the Fermentation Lab of the global game-changing three-star restaurant and adapting my own less hi-tech equipment for the experiment.

They’ve allowed me to share the recipe from their Noma Guide to Fermentation (Artisan, £30), seeing how keen I was to explore a culinary technique handed down since Roman times and given a new lease of life by Noma founder Rene Redzepi and David Zilber, his head of fermentation for five years.

Read my ‘Anchovy is of the Essence – Garum, Coltura d’Alici and Nam Pla’ for a primer in my nascent discipleship and desire to enhance the flavours of my cooking with the funkiest of fermented sauces but without the traditional fish. https://www.neilsowerby.co.uk/2021/07/02/anchovy-is-of-the-essence-garum-colatura-dalici-and-nam-pla/ Now comes the hard, stinky part. I’ve purchased my chicken bones and wings and have adapted a rice cooker to stand in for a fermentation chamber, modifying the amount of raw materials to fit.

I’ve cheated by buying in organic pearl barley koji (from Amazon UK); next time I’ll start from scratch, but first I’ll have to acquire a koji tray. Another boy’s gastro toy, my wife sighs.

For the uninitiated, Koji is cooked rice that has been inoculated with Aspergillus oryzae, a mold that’s widespread in Japan. The mold releases enzymes that ferment the rice by decomposing its carbohydrates and proteins. In this case the process is applied to barley (barley miso is made this way). 

• Wish me luck over the coming weeks. I’ve followed the authors’ instructions to carefully peruse more detailed instructions in the ‘Beef Garum’ section but, with my success rate in creating basic kimchi not of the highest, I’m going to be on tenterhooks. All of a ferment, you might say. 

Roasted Chicken Wing Garum

Makes about 1.5 litres

2kg chicken bones; 3kg chicken wings; 450g Pearl Barley Koji; 480 grams non-iodised salt.

Roasting brings a lot of rich, fully developed flavour to this garum, meaning it needs only about a month of fermentation to coax out more umami. If we were to ferment this chicken garum as long as we do beef or squid garum, it would lose its subtlety and complexity.

Method:

Place the bones in a large pot and fill with water just to cover—about three litres. Bring the water to a boil, skimming away any impurities that float to the surface as it comes to temperature. Once it reaches a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer and cook the stock for three hours.

In the meantime, heat the oven to 180°C/355°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place the chicken wings on the lined sheet and roast them for 40 to 50 minutes, tossing several times while cooking to ensure that they get an even, dark browning. Remove the wings from the oven and let them cool down. Weigh out 2 kilograms of the roasted wings and use a cleaver to chop them into small pieces. Strain the chicken stock through a fine-mesh sieve and allow it to cool.

Pulse the koji in a food processor to break it up into small pieces. Put the chopped chicken wings, koji, salt, and 1.6 kilograms of the chicken stock in a 3-litre fermentation vessel of your choice and stir to combine thoroughly. Scrape down the inner sides of the container with gloved hands or a rubber spatula and lay a sheet of plastic wrap directly on the surface of the liquid. Cover the container with a lid; screw it on slightly less than completely tight if it’s a screw cap or leave it slightly ajar in one corner if it’s a snap lid. Ferment the garum in a fermentation chamber at 60°C/140°F or in an electric rice cooker on “keep warm” for four weeks.

Every day for the first week, use a clean spoon or ladle to skim off as much fat as you can, then stir the garum and cover again. After the first week, skim and stir once a week.

To harvest: 

Pass the garum through a fine-mesh sieve, and then again through a sieve lined with cheesecloth. Allow the liquid to settle and skim off any fat that floats to the surface.

Pour the garum into bottles or another covered container. The garum is very stable and will keep well in the fridge for months. You can also freeze it for longer storage without any negative effects, but note that because of the high salt content, it probably won’t freeze completely solid.

Suggested Uses:

Ramen Broth

When first tasting roasted chicken wing garum, almost every Noma chef mutters the same word: “Ramen.” It’s true, this garum possesses some of the same deep, meaty tones of a great bowl of ramen. A splash poured into a basic kombu and katsuobushi dashi makes for a convincing cheat. And if you’ve made a more proper ramen broth, a touch of garum will help kick the flavor up to eleven.

Roasted Cashews

Coat cashews (or any nut of your choice) with melted butter and spread onto a baking sheet or oven- safe pan. Roast in a 160°C/320°F oven until they become golden brown and fragrant. Remove them from the oven and mix in a couple of tablespoons of chicken wing garum. Don’t add so much garum that the liquid pools on the pan. All the garum should be absorbed by the nuts and evaporated by the heat. You don’t want the cashews to become soggy. Once they cool, they should still be crunchy, with a savoury, salty crust.

Excerpted from Foundations of Flavor: The Noma Guide to Fermentation by Rene Redzepi and David Zilber (Artisan Books). Photographs by Evan Sung.

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Flawd rises as sea buckthorn and saumur champigny share the waterfront

In the week that Noma belatedly gained a third Michelin star after years of accolades for transforming the way we look at the food on our plate and how we source the raw materials it seems entirely of the moment to be talking low intervention wines with one of its alumni.

No, not on the Refshaleøen waterfront in Copenhagen, where chef Rene Radzepi works his culinary magic; our view is of New Islington Marina, extension of Manchester’s own hip enclave, Ancoats. Dan Craig Martin is the curator of the wine offering at Flawd, latest arrival on Marina Promenade. Originally from Oregon, Dan spent three years working at Noma. 

New Islington Marina looks idyllic in the autumn sunshine… time for natural wine and charcuterie

Crucially he was previously at Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant in upstate New York – the farm to table crucible where the Joseph Otway/Richard Cossins project, Higher Ground, was forged. Richard was general manager at Stone Barns when fellow Brit Joe arrived as fish chef.

In 2020 Higher Ground sprang up in Manchester as a residency in the Kampus development. Here’s my Manchester Confidential review, which also unravels the partners’ CVs that include America, London, Copenhagen and Stockport.

After further peripatetic pop-ups their eyes are on a permanent restaurant site in the NOMA (the acronym is catching) district near Victoria Station, probably next year. Higher Ground has benefited from keeping their terrific team intact too – the likes of Meg and Chris.

The gang are all together at self-styled neighbourhood wine bar Flawd. Awkward name for a destination that decidedly isn’t. OK, the lack of an extractor fan means there’s no cooking on the premises. So expect assemblies of produce grown at Cinderwood, a Cheshire market garden they are partners in or platters of British cheeses and charcuterie with bread from neighbours Pollen Bakery, naturally.

Not just any charcuterie, mind. It’s sourced from Curing Rebels in Brighton, up there with the UK’s best producers of cured, fermented and smoked treats. The £12 plate on the menu for my visit featured salami, smoked sausage and coppa. So perfect to share a bottle of wine over with a view of barges and wildfowl (oh and the odd steepling apartment block in the distance).

I warmed immediately both to the wines and ciders on Flawd’s shelves, to drink in or take away, and to new partner Dan’s approach to specialising in ‘low intervention’. It’s no secret that natural wine apostles can turn into zealots, given consumer resistance. Here the choice, with affordable wines by the glass too, is much more welcoming. 

Natural wines will always be a broad church. Some wines will be a challenge to traditional, maybe hidebound palates, but there’s so much to convert you with proper advice from Dan. We share a love of less alcoholic Loire reds from Cabernet Franc and Gamay grapes. Among the most vibrant vignerons in the region is biodynamic champion Thierry Germain, marrying a modern approach to tradition (he uses both shire horses horses and specially light quad bikes in the vineyards). His Roches Neuves Saumur Champigny is £37 to drink in and at £28 to carry out. I couldn’t resist the latter.

To accompany a trio of dishes I was recommended a red from Northern Spain that combined old favourite grape Mencia with a dash of Palomino, white grape best known for sherry. Fascinating and very drinkable. 

Each of the dishes showed the value of Cinderwood. This one acre biologically intensive market garden in Poole, Cheshire, is based on the regenerative, organic principles championed by Dan Barber at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in a quest for the best possible flavours 

Under grower Michael Fitzsimmons, Cinderwood is supplying an increasing number of Manchester’s best places to eat, including 10 Tib Lane, Elnecot and The Creameries, which all share a similar ethos. Flawd, though, benefits from a daily supply chain, on which they base a swiftly changing menu.

What also cheers me is the presence of ‘signature’ ingredients that featured in that first Kampus tasting menu – the likes of smoked cod roe, Tropea onions, sea buckthorn.

Rings of Tropea, that intense red onion originally from Calabria, join an ox heart crumble in a sweet/savoury jumble on the freshest ice queen lettuce, another Italian ‘expatriate’ variety

Wafer-thin slices of courgette come dotted with Morecambe Bay shrimp in an elderflower dressing; even prettier and mouth-tingling is a dish where almost transparent discs of cucumber are coated in (the acceptable face of taramsalata) an emulsion of smoke cod roe and garnished with strips of lemony sorrel.

Most of the small dishes range in price from a fiver to £8. Seated next to the pass with Joe hard at work, the most popular dishes on the night appeared to be smoked salmon with Manchester sea buckthorn hot sauce and Lancaster Smokehouse mackerel on toast.

Of the new ventue Joe has said: “We really just want to open a neighbourhood wine bar for the growing New Islington community, to create a space for people to drink great wine, relax and have fun. Treat it as an ideal destination for an after-work drink, an aperitivo before dinner, or a few drinks before a night out in surrounding Ancoats or the Northern Quarter.”

I think it’s going to be hugely popular and I’m looking forward to a proper investigation of its bottleshop shelves. Still, it feels a product of canny expediency, a stepping stone towards a full restaurant experience Higher Ground. Now that would lift the spirits for 2022. Joseph Otway cooking on gas again!

Flawd, Unit 3, Mansion House, Marina Promenade, New Islington, M4 6JL. Wine bar hours: Wed/Thu/Sun: 5pm-11pm; Fri/Sat: 5pm-11:30pm. Bottle shop hours: Wed/ Thu/Sun: 12pm-11pm; Fri/Sat: 12pm-11:30pm. Main image left to right: Richard, Meg, Joe, Dan and Chris.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns 

This is the (literally) groundbreaking project of farm to table guru/chef Dan Barber. With a messianic zeal, his book The Third Plate: Field Notes for the Future of Food (Abacus) champions organic flavour-driven produce as a meal focus. Shift to fewer slabs of protein, elevate the finest quality veg and grains to centre stage, respect the earth is the message. To see what can be achieved on the plate, check out series one, episode two of Netflix’s Chef’s Table.

Natural Wine primers

I’d suggest two books by Alice Fiering – Natural Wine for the People (Ten Speed Press) and The Dirty Guide To Wine (Countryman Press), the latter in conjunction with Pascaline Lepetiere. Less terroir hardcore and covering organic and biodynamic producers is Wine Revolution (Jacqui Small) by Jane Anson.

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Anchovy is of the essence – Garum, Colatura d’alici and Nam Pla

I noticed recently Mana was advertising for a ‘Chef of Fermentation’. That’s quite a specific job title in a hospitality marketplace that’s struggling to find sous chefs and KPs. But when you’re on a mission to net that second Michelin star it’s best to stay true to your culinary direction and gut feelings (sic). 

Garum will certainly be on the kitchen to-do list for the new recruit. It entered the conversation early on in my first visit to the Ancoats Manchester game-changer. I’d already been impressed by dishes such as smoked yakitori eel, glazed with roasted yeast and blueberry vinegar, and Dungeness crab baked in hay celeriac and masa.

Underneath that shell the oyster dish that leant on chicken garum

Chef patron Simon Martin had talked us through both. Next up was a raw oyster tucked taco style into a cabbage leaf with fudge miso, chicken fat, English wasabi, pine salt and chicken garum. In mid-explanation he was surprised by my knowledge of garum’s back story – the fermented fish sauce used as a condiment in the cuisines of Ancient Greece and Rome, not a million miles away from Thai fish sauce Nom Pla..

Simon had adapted garum to incorporate chicken. At his culinary alma mater, Rene Redzepi’s Noma in Copenhagen, they offer a whole palette of garums. Look at this beauty: rose and shrimp garum with a suitably rose-tinted description of what is essentially a whack of umami-rich funk. 

Rose shrimp garum symbolises Noma’s innovative take on ancient traditions

“We take shrimps, water and salt, with fresh roses and blend it. It is naturally fermented by the enzymes inside the shrimps. During the foraging season last year, the fresh roses were added and they have been fermenting together ever since. The garum is quite intense by itself but the roses bring balance to it with its floral notes and sweetness.”

There’s a whole chapter on garum in The Norma Guide To Fermentation (Artisan, £30) by Redzepi and David Zibler, the man he entrusted to run the restaurant’s Fermentation Lab. Another member of the team convinced them to diverge from fish as the base. Hence, chicken, bee pollen and grasshoppers. All made is temperature controlled cylinders, leaving nothing to chance in this stinkiest of production processes.

That would probably be heresy to John Niland, chef owner of St Peter in Sydney, Australia. His ethos, laid out in his cookbook/manifesto, The Whole Fish, is to use all of the creature. Like Nose to Tail meat cooking, the object is not to waste the 60 per cent or so of  a round fish that is routinely discarded in a western restaurant. Again one of the team (so democratic this new wave in the kitchen) came up with a sustainable garum.

“To produce the garum, start by adding 50 per cent of water to the total amount of heads, bones and scraps you have from small fish, such as sardine, mackerel, anchovies or trevally, then to this total quantity add 20 per cent of fine salt. Mix together, transfer to a mason (kilner) jar, seal and place in a circulator bath set to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Leave for seven days in the dark, stirring once daily. Make sure that the gall bladder is removed as it will make the finished sauce extremely bitter. This recipe is versatile and can be adapted to produce scallop, prawn (shrimp) or cuttlefish garums.”

In Niland’s follow-up book, Take One Fish: The new school of scale-to-tail eating (Hardie Grant, £26, to be published August 5) he goes one challenging step further with a recipe for custard tart, made with a sardine garum caramel made using the head, bones and scraps of sardines.

Imperial Rome was an enthusiastic consumer of garum (or liquamen)

Leaving aside today’s state of the art equipment, it is a method the Ancients would have recognised. Garum was a fermented fish sauce used as a condiment in the cuisines of ancient Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. Liquamen was a similar preparation, and at times the two were synonymous. It enjoyed its greatest popularity in the Roman world.

Pliny the Elder derives the Latin word garum from the Greek γαρός (garos), maybe a type of fish, and states that it was crafted e from fish intestines, with salt, creating a liquor, the garum, and a sediment named (h)allec or allex. A concentrated garum evaporated down to a thick paste with salt crystals was called muria – packed with protein, amino acids, minerals and B vitamins, so not far off today’s soy sauce.

After the liquid was ladled off of the top of the mixture, the remains of the fish, called allec, was used by the poorest classes to flavour their farinata or porridge. 

The finished product—the nobile garum of Martial’s epigram—was apparently mild and subtle in flavor. The best garum fetched extraordinarily high prices, and salt could be substituted for a simpler dish. Garum appears in many recipes featured in the Roman cookbook Apicius. For example, Apicius (8.6.2–3) gives a recipe for lamb stew, calling for the meat to be cooked with onion and coriander, pepper, lovage, cumin, liquamen, oil, and wine, then thickened with flour.

The traditional way of creating Colatura d’alici from salt and anchovies

And so to Colatura d’alici. I hastened to purchase a vial of this intense stuff (it translates fetchingly as anchovy drippings) after one of my favourite chefs, Jeremy Lee of Soho’s legendary Quo Vadis recommended it in Observer Food Monthly.

He  wrote: “Alici is the essence of anchovy and it’s a very precious condiment. It comes in a very small bottle, like a bottle of perfume. It’s not cheap, but it’s relatively easy to get, and a little goes a long way. It’s never gone off – well, not that it lasts long enough to find out. I get it from Andy Harris at the Vinegar Shed (£26.50) and use it sparingly. It’s an elegant variation on using Worcestershire sauce in something, but it’s not so overwhelming. There’s a softness to it that’s amazing, it adds a roundness. You just need a few drops.

“It’s extraordinary in braised lamb and hogget dishes – lamb and anchovy is such a fabulous combination. Pork too. I add the alici to porchetta tonnato as a final flourish, much as you would add a squeeze of lemon juice. I find the combination of alici and lemon juice incredible in all sorts of dishes. It’s an extraordinary ingredient and one I cherish.”

Colatura d’alici works well as a simple dressing for spaghetti

Like traditionally made Southeast Asian-style fish sauce, but with a much longer ageing process, colatura is concocted with just anchovies and sea salt. For colatura anchovy fillets and salt are layered in wooden barrels (chestnut is good) and then set them aside in a temperature-controlled environment to ferment for up to three years. The liquid exuded ages into colatura, which is surprisingly unfishy. Still a health warning – this is mega pungent. But worth it.

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