I won’t beat around the bush, or waffle on as I often do. Instead, I will get straight to it.
This month’s three conundrums, plucked from a mailbag fit to bursting, are as follows:
I get confused by miso. What do I need to know and how should I be using it?
Should I bother peeling tomatoes? Lots of recipes demand that I do, but does it really make any difference?
What are the rules when buying a chicken?
Do remember, if you have a little culinary concern or niggle that you’d like explored, explained, expanded upon or dispelled, let me know and it will be added to the list to be dealt with in good time.
I get confused by miso. What do I need to know and how should I be using it?
Fundamentally, Miso is simply fermented soybeans, and in Japan, it will typically be used for sauces and spreads, pickling vegetables, fish, or meats, and mixing with dashi for the ubiquitous miso soup, which I guess is where most of us first encounter it.
There are reams of books, recipes, and internet real estate dedicated to miso, and all of that is very useful indeed, but I find that in order to understand best how miso might prove useful to you it’s best to buy some, swipe a finger through it and taste it. I’m guessing your nearest supermarket will have some miso, likely white miso, and this is as good a place as any to start. It will be sweet and salty and very delicious indeed. Of course, you can seek out some classic Japanese dishes and use your newly purchased white miso in those, but I find it easiest to start to think about where white miso might replace or reinforce flavours you already feel comfortable with.
For instance, in a dish where you’re likely to find yourself sweating onions and adding salt to get a good savoury base, try adding a tablespoon of miso instead of the salt and tasting that. I also often use miso in a savoury base where I don’t have the time to cook something for a good long time and develop flavour that way, adding a spoonful of miso can replicate that long-slow oniony sweating process and deliver a similar savoury impact in a fraction of the time. Similarly, a dish that might be seasoned at the end, with parmesan for instance, could instead have a spoonful of white miso stirred through when hot (risotto and potato dishes work really well here, especially mashed potato, although that’s one for later in the year perhaps). I love white miso in a salad dressing with oil and vinegar, and if you’re making a marinade for meat or fish, adding a little miso in the same way that you might already add anchovies or Dijon mustard to give that salty savoury twang is a nice idea. It won’t be the same effect, white miso is more complex and in some ways more fruity and sweet as well as being salty, but it will take your dish in a good direction, I promise.
You can of course work up through the gears with miso. There is nice yellow miso, which has been fermented for longer, and so will be slightly funkier and saltier, and then you can take it up to red and brown miso which is saltier and more pungent still. You’ll sometimes find people using this darker miso in baking where it brings a very naughty salty-molasses-fudgy quality to brownies or sponges that might have a saucy/syrupy element to them like treacle sponge or Jamaican ginger cake.
There is no substitute for trying your miso neat and pulling apart its flavour. I would say that there is absolutely no need to try and work miso into your cooking just for the sake of it. The swelling of miso-inclusive recipes across food media happens due to waves of trends and the need for originality colliding and recipe writers simply substituting a handful of trad ingredients for a spangly new ingredient that sounds exotic but does almost the same job. If you’re a curious cook who relishes experimenting and expanding your culinary tool kit, buy a white miso and start from there. It is the most versatile end of the miso spectrum and might just act as your gateway into the seasoning. Good luck.
Should I bother peeling tomatoes? Lots of recipes demand that I do, but does it really make any difference?
Nah.
What are the rules when buying a chicken?
I supposed the trite answer is, buy the best chicken you can afford, but is that really a helpful response any more?
I’ve noticed a chasm appearing on supermarket shelves where chicken is concerned. Where once, post Fernley-Whittingstall and Jamie O’s campaigning, one’s supermarket chiller shelf might have held a few unceremoniously packed and scantily labelled chickens that you knew you should avoid, a plethora of proud ‘free range’ birds that spanned the spectrum from pale skinned (barely) ‘free range’, to the feed-induced sunburst yellow of the ‘corn fed free-range’ bird, then right up to the regal ‘organic’ bird that winked at you like a banker at a swim-up hotel bar - all bases were covered, and, assuming the bargain basement birds and the winking bankers were to be discounted and ignored, you could relatively reasonably pluck a bird from the ‘free-range’ middle of the offering and feel secure in your choice. Now, most chickens on a supermarket display are devoid of the reassuring assurances as to the rearing of the thing, and unless you go top-whack and shimmy up to the bronzed banker in Brylcream and expensive trunks, one feels part of the brutal mistreatment of poultry. You know the high-roller supermarket chicken is often all puff and marketing anyway, and you’ll feel sullied adding it to our trolley, but you know also that the butchers’ chickens, the ones we should be buying if only we had a butcher workably close to home, are all north of a score, so you’re snookered one way or the other.
Given this inflationary squeeze and the reduction in offering that has ensued, there is the temptation to espouse buying an expensive but saintly whole chicken and using it in multiple ways, an old trick that is always presented as a cost-effective, even parsimonious, way to go about buying and cooking chicken, but I’m less and less sure if it tracks. You’re still likely staring down the barrel of £20 for your chicken, and unless you’re roasting the thing for a big group or an avid and diligent stock maker, much of the skin and bones you’re paying for is likely to end up in the food waste. And god forbid life happens and you end up neglecting the leftovers and the pickings from the carcass. You might just have spent £20 pounds for chicken that might otherwise have cost you £3-5 if bought in the exact quantity needed for the thing you are cooking.
Buy the amount of chicken you need and buy the best you can afford for that amount. Perhaps that’s the advice? Or take a nihilistic approach and accept that fiddling around the edges of the morality of commercial poultry farming is a largely pointless exercise. Even free range doesn’t mean much in a supermarket sense. So unless you’re buying genuinely outdoor-reared chickens that have been allowed to mature for upwards of 80 days, which in reality means buying from a butcher and paying properly for the chicken, the chicken in question is likely to have passed through a pretty similar factory-style life of rearing and processing before being hung upside down on a conveyor belt with its head dragged through water whilst it is electrocuted and then plucked and packaged for our supermarket shelves. The general welfare of British chickens is improving all the time, that is important to say, but the reality of any meat farmed commercially is pretty brutal when laid out in black and white.
We kill and consume around 83 million chickens each week in the UK, which amounts to about 35kg per person per year. And the majority of that is farmed quite intensively, even when designated as free-range. So the hardline answer is still to buy the best chicken you can afford from a butcher that knows where its chickens come from. Failing that, I guess the rules are: make peace with the realities of how chickens are farmed or stop eating chicken altogether. The latter being the better option, I’d say
Apologies that that went slightly left. I meant to say, eat less but better quality meat, in all instances, and cook with good vegetables and the like the rest of the time. That is the advice you need when buying a chicken.