Som Tam, Thai papaya salad

One of my favourite culinary memories of our year-long trip around the world was the salad in Thailand. It’s called Som Tam and typically combines raw shredded green papaya with all the best south-east Asian flavours: garlic, chilli, lime, peanut, fish sauce, palm sugar to make a bowl of pure zing that punches with sweet, sour, salt and heat in equal measure. There’s not a lettuce leaf in sight. I will go on record: lettuce is boring green crap with no value except to pad out otherwise perfectly good salads and sandwiches.


Now, there’s one essential problem with making Som Tam at home in England. Green papaya. It’s easier to find a parking space in Kingston on the Saturday before Christmas than a green papaya. Don’t whatever you do go and buy the “least ripe” papaya from your local supermarket – it will still be way too ripe. No, you have two options if you don’t happen to live next door to a really good oriental supermarket. First: buy a green papaya on-line, for £8 plus another £7 postage and packing. I got mine from this website, and it worked an (expensive) treat. One is enough for six to eight portions of salad. Second: start rummaging in the greengrocer for something to use as an alternative.

The green papaya is only there to provide texture and to absorb and distribute all the strong flavours added to the salad, it tastes of pretty much nothing itself. You just need something that will shred into fairly crunchy strips that eat well raw. I’ve found mention of Som Tam made with apples, or carrots, but the former I think bring too much of their own juicy taste and the latter are… well… carrots. Blech. And so I bring to you the perfect alternative to green papaya, nearly identical in texture, mild in taste and cheap to boot… Turnip Som Tam.

It’s perfect.

Som Tam, Thai salad (serves two)

Two handfuls shredded papaya/turnip
1 tomato, sliced in thin segments
1 small handful fine beans
2 bird’s eye chillies
1 fat garlic clove
2 tsp dried shrimps (optional)
1 handful roasted unsalted peanuts
3 tsp palm sugar (or caster)
3 tsp fish sauce
Juice of 1 lime
  1. Roughly chop the chillies and garlic (a fresh, juicy clove is important) then pound them to pulp in a pestle and mortar
  2. Add the palm sugar and pound some more, you want to end up with pretty much paste
  3. Now add the dried shrimp if you have them, pound some more. These are also hard to come by, but you won’t lose much by omitting them
  4. Next add the peanuts, and pound them into little bits but not to a paste. The peanuts need to be roasted, but not salted or coated – I found that I had to buy monkey nuts and shell them
  5. Top and tail the beans, and cut into inch-long pieces. If you’ve only got a small granite mortar, you’ll probably find it is full by now, so put the beans in a large bowl and crush them a bit with your knuckles. Add all the gunk from the mortar
  6. I used a third of a green papaya, or one good sized turnip. I shredded it with a mandolin, as I’m not sure how well a simple grater will get on with these veggies – it’ll probably be okay.
  7. Add the shredded papaya/turnip (or whatever you are substituting), the sliced tomatoes, the fish sauce and the lime juice. Go in with your hands and smush everything together, just spend a few seconds bruising everything so all the flavours mingle.
  8. Taste some. This is important, as personal taste and variation in the ingredients really come into play in this dish. Some limes have very little juice, some fish sauces are stronger than others. So: add more lime, fish sauce or palm sugar as necessary to get the right balance of flavours for you.

Enjoy! Oh, and I should have said: if you don’t like much heat, go for only one chilli. The perfect accompaniment to any Thai food, or any simple seafood dish for that matter.

Review: The Gurnard’s Head, Cornwall

It’s been a very long day. You’re navigating along a narrow winding lane with rough granite walls on either side, occasionally rounding a corner to find yourself driving through a farmyard, or face-to-face with an oncoming tractor. Grey clouds roll overhead, to your left is a high and windswept moorland, to your right there’s just a handful of moody cows and a long drop between you and the slaty Atlantic ocean. You’ve left the last town in England* behind you, and what the map says is about four miles seems to wind on forever. You’re in Cornwall, of course. And then ahead of you rises the friendly granite bulk of a pub in glorious isolation, with “Gurnards Head” written on the slate roof in huge white letters.

It’s hard to imagine a location more requiring of a friendly welcome, a cosy room and some good cooking. Luckily the Gurnard’s Head scores high on all three. I get the impression that most people choose to dine and stay the night. Very sensible too, as it stands in glorious isolation on the rugged coast of Penwith, the very last bit of Cornwall before you fall into the Atlantic. And why attempt a

perilous drive to the nearest town on a dark and stormy night when there’s perfectly brilliant food on offer at the pub?

As far as accommodation goes, the rooms here are going to divide opinion. I loved it; gorgeous Welsh blankets on the comfy bed, old unfussy sticks of furniture, a book shelf of random tomes and a window out onto the rough Cornish moorland. The in-room hot drinks include freshly ground coffee and tea that was actually grown in Cornwall. On the other hand, the shower was a piddly electric unit that dispensed scalding hot then freezing cold water in (mercifully predictable) twenty second bursts, the mechanism on the window blind was broken, there was no wardrobe to hang up clothes, no full-length mirror and no desk or table to sit at. So if you are the kind of person irritated by quirks and only happy with “all mod cons” then I suggest you check into the St Ives Holiday Inn. You’ve been warned!

Downstairs there’s a friendly bar, with friendly bar staff, and a boldly painted rustic dining room that makes the most of the massive

granite walls of the old pub. Proper local beers on tap, and an interesting and thoughtful selection of wines by the glass. The wines are excellent value, the more so once you sit down to eat. We ambled down for a drink at the bar before dinner, refreshed and ready for the trough.

My starter was a plate of rich, sticky pieces of braised calf’s tongue. Delicious, but knocked into touch by Maureen’s dish of oyster rissoles sitting in a bowl of grass green vichyssoise of alexanders. If you’re not a forager that might look a bit greek. I ‘splain. Alexanders are a wild plant vaguely like parsley, one of the first things to start growing on clifftops and almost forgotten as a food. I’m guessing they provided the strong green colour and flavour that complimented the warm, crunchy, salty rissole so well. I just love being given something

from the hedgerow that I’ve scarcely heard of, especially when it tastes good.

And so to main course, where I chose guineafowl and Maureen picked cod. She won again, this being probably the most perfectly cooked piece of cod I’ve encountered, no doubt benefiting from having been landed less than ten miles away. It was accompanied by fat, chewy pickled cockles and a balancing mixture of veg. My guineafowl was a superb supper dish, the bird carefully cooked to keep some pink and matched beautifully with creamy mousseline potatoes and enormous fat chunks of braised leek. I don’t mind saying, I am never going to cook leeks any other way ever again.

My dessert was a log of banana-y parfait with a dark chocolate sorbet and crystallised peanuts. The sorbet was great, the first example to convince me that the words “chocolate” and “sorbet” should ever be used so closely together on a menu. The parfait wasn’t my thing; parfait logs always look industrial, with little indentations from

the wrapping still visible like moulded concrete. Maureen, feeling full, went for a melon soup which was light but had a surprising depth of roast melon flavour and plenty of umami. As someone who has tried (and failed) to make melon soup taste good, I could really appreciate it.

Good stuff. We trundled back upstairs very well fed and watered, marvelling that such a neat gem of a dining room should be able to survive in such an out of the way place. Especially as their rate for Dinner, Bed & Breakfast is so damnably reasonable; their mid-week winter special D&B&B was £125 per couple, which feels like either the room or the meal were almost thrown in as a freebie. A stay at The Gurnard’s Head is a huge and welcome breath of fresh air.

We enjoyed ourselves so much that we stayed (and ate) another night. Scallops, crab, more great fish and kippers for breakfast!


* – in fact the tiny town of St Just is further west, only a mile or two from Land’s End, but you’ll allow me some poetic license

Food Bloggers Unplugged

My last few posts have been restaurant reviews, so for a bit of a break I’ve decided to chip in on “Food Bloggers Unplugged” and let my audience know a bit more about where I come from food-wise. Thanks to All That I’m Eating for inviting me to do so.

What or who inspired you to start your blog?
In July 2010 I went travelling around the world for a year with Otter (that’s a nickname, not a literal otter) and decided to keep a blog: Otter Adrift. Well, it’s what the modern round-the-world traveller does. I’m very pleased with my travel blog, love looking at it and reminiscing. When we got back I still had itchy blogging fingers, and food seemed like the obvious subject.


Who is your foodie inspiration?
For as long as I can remember (that’d be university, 20 years ago), I’ve cooked all my food from ingredients. I never touched ready-meals and even turned my nose up at ready-made pasta sauces. And from about the same time I have always sought to eat out at independent restaurants and cafes in preference to chains.

I honestly cannot think who or what was the original inspiration for this. I think I’ve just absorbed this and that from a whole variety of sources. People describe themselves as passionate foodies. Sadly, I’m just a moderately interested foodie. Pff.

In the same way that I’ve never followed a football team or been a huge fan of a singer or band, I don’t really have any strong feelings about all the abundance of food celebs. Hm. I probably have most time for Nigel Slater.

Your greasiest most batter splattered cook book is?
I have about 20 cookbooks. 15 of them have scarcely been opened since the initial flick through. Of the remaining five, easily my favourite is Nigel Slater’s “Tender”. Because it’s not just recipes, it tells you how each vegetable works and what works with it. For a make-it-up cook like me, perfect.

The best thing you have ever eaten in another country, where was it and what was it?
MmmMMmmm. Black pepper crab in Singapore. That was such a huge crab, and so beautiful. South-east Asia is the best region on the planet for good food. South America, by contrast, is the worst. I recently recreated the black pepper crab at home, and it was almost as good.


Another Food Blogger’s table you would like to eat at?
Tricky question! Whenever I read another food blog I’m envious of their obvious passion for cooking and how much time they must spend in the kitchen, trying things out and getting them right. It could be Memalee, since I’m still reminiscing about all the great south-east Asian food from our trip while I write this. Or it could be All That I’m Eating, because we share a taste for doing tasty and seasonal things with market produce.

What one kitchen gadget would you like Santa to bring you? (money no object)
How about a smokery? I love smoked flavour in most things, so that’s something I’d like to play with myself.

Who taught you how to cook?
No-one. I didn’t start cooking until I went to university, and my early attempts were disgusting but not deadly. I’ve just absorbed stuff over the years; tips and ideas from cookbooks, TV programs and eating out. Mum has sent me various recipes over the years too, of course! So yeah, self-taught, gradual improvement.

I’m coming to you for dinner, what is your signature dish?
If signature dish means the thing that most friends or family are likely to say “oh, you should try Matthew’s X…” then it’s probably the humble Spanish omelette.

What is your guilty food pleasure?
Well, I’m a helluva food snob so I don’t really have any guilt in the sense of “I shouldn’t eat this crap”; no McD’s fries, no chocolate Hobnobs, no pop tarts, no ready meals. I suppose if I didn’t rein it in my cream tea habit could easily get out of control! So: stuffing myself with scones, jam and clotted cream.

Reveal something about yourself that others would be surprised to learn?
I may be in my thirties and only 10 stone, but I have that supreme ailment of gourmands down the centuries: the gout. I was afflicted about six years ago and I can’t think of any way a big toe could be more painful, unless it was perhaps being hit repeatedly with a sledgehammer. I suspect I’ll blog about this in more detail at some point!

Finally, I must confess that I’ve looked around the few food blogs I read with any regularity and they’ve all done this questionnaire already – so I can’t keep the ball rolling by inviting another five respondents. I’ll just draw your attention to my list of “Links”, in the right-hand column. They’re all great blogs, so check out any that appeal to you.

Review: Drake’s, Ripley

Ripley is one of the amiably well-to-do villages of Surrey, surrounded by farmland and replete with boutique homeware shops, cosy deli/cafes and red-brick dining pubs. Yet even though Surrey is the most cushy and well-to-do county in all of Englandshire, for the longest time

there was a desert of good places to eat twixt the Thames and the Downs. Drake’s has been in Ripley a few years now, and is definitely an oasis of fine dining.

Some have criticised the ambience at Drake’s, but as we were a table of seven for lunch we rather brought our own ambience with us, making it hard to comment objectively. The dining room is light and airy, with exposed beams and minimal decoration. I liked it. Our little corner had a feature wall with moo-cow wallpaper. Service was friendly and courteous.

The lunchtime tasting menu is reasonably good value at £45. Frankly I might have paid that to sit there and stuff myself with the scrumptious bite-sized roast red pepper brioches that were one of the breads. I could have too; the more of them we ate, the more they brought out. The amuse was a little biscuit of curry meringue with a dollop of chicken liver parfait atop. I am always delighted when I get given something that is both delicious and entirely new to me and this scored on both counts.

First course was a little beignet of onion with crab apple puree, delicious although the almost fluid texture of the onion was a tad unexpected inside the crispy crumb. This was followed a scallop with

chorizo and sweet potato, all very neat and perfectly executed albeit hardly stirring the blood. The fish course was a tasty little piece of turbot with a trio of roast beetroot and fennel, best described as “nice” and not really the strongest course. Beetroot is always going to be earthy, making it a difficult partner in a dish that was otherwise all about subtlety. At this stage I was starting to think we’d fallen into into a fairly humdrum tasting menu, so it was a pleasure to find our main course much braver. A slow-cooked piece of beef was made bitter with the addition of coffee and then paired with sweet carrots and orange. An interesting and genuinely successful attempt to freshen up what is usually cosy fireside meat, the meal felt back on track.

Pre-dessert: beetroot and orange milkshake. This was a lovely palate-cleanser, an appropriate use of beetroot in a sweet situation, and very thoughtful to bring together two ingredients that had featured in earlier dishes. Dessert was a light and moreish pistachio cake topped

with slivers of caramelised banana and paired with a black olive ice cream. This was a stunner, and the only truly successful use of olives in dessert that I’ve ever found. The bits of olive were somehow crystallised and/or roasted; crunchy, chewy and sweet but retaining a pronounced olive taste. Yum.

I’d be remiss in not mentioning the best set of petit fours I’ve had in a long while. Granted, it helped that I wasn’t exactly stuffed; portions at Drake’s are small, so at the end of the meal I was content rather than full. Nothing spoils petit fours more than having to make a dutiful attempt to wedge them in like the last few items into an already bursting suitcase. Nevertheless, these were delicious and with oddities like a red pepper macaroon Steve Drake is clearly keen to break out from the obvious right to the very end.

Drake’s is good. Our meal was faultless in execution and scattered with enough challenging combinations and surprising successes that it sits comfortably above the more predictable tasting menus. I’d say this makes it worth the less than bargain lunchtime price, although the same menu is only ten pounds more in the evening. Certainly worth dragging yourself out of the metropolis and down the A3 for.

Review: Dinner, Knightsbridge

We came to Dinner for dinner. It would be strange to have lunch at Dinner, and indeed the dark

and urbane dining room doesn’t really strike me as a daytime venue. So muted is the lighting that at first I thought every other diner was wearing black, white or grey in obedience to an unwritten dress code that we hadn’t been told about. This is a good atmosphere, though, classy yet convivial, with the arresting use of big white jelly moulds as lampshades to remind us that we’re in the hands of a playful chef. Behind the plate glass that reveals the busy team of young chefs there are a dozen whole pineapples turning on a spit before a crackling fire. This whimsical centrepiece is excusable as chunks of the pineapple are used in one of the desserts. And in the same way these crummy photos are excused by the moody lighting!

Let’s get down to business. And the business is dinner. Starter, main and pud. None of your fancy amuses bouche or pre-dessert, just three courses and all of them a proper size. This is clearly part of the theme; the whole menu is inspired by dishes found in cookbooks dating back from Victorian to medieval times, resulting in menu items like

“meat fruit” and “rice and flesh”. Three courses, decent portions, also all very traditional.

My starter was a lamb broth, poured over a dice of veg, slow-cooked hen’s yolk and three pieces of breaded sweetbread. These unfortunately were too small for the sweetbread to overcome the fried breadcrumb coating, but the broth was strong and clear-as-a-bell. “Rice and flesh” turns out to be a punchy saffron risotto with fragments of calf tail cooked until gooey in red wine. Snails lined up on marrow taste deeply delicious. “Meat fruit” looks like a mandarin but is chicken

parfait wrapped in a mandarin jelly, a brilliant caprice which is also a great flavour pairing.

Next course, and Dinner turns out to be well named, because the mains are the strongest courses. And really, it is so seldom I find myself saying so that it’s worth pointing out. Pork chop, duck breast, pigeon breast, steak, I think that right around the table we all muttered phrases like “must be the best ever…” or “can’t remember the last time…” between greedy mouthfuls. For me, my pork chop was the clearest connection between Dinner and the Fat Duck. These restaurants are worlds apart in style and substance, but they share in

spades Heston’s alchemical ability to condense and concentrate the very essence of a flavour into itself. This was without doubt the porkiest pork chop I have ever enjoyed.

Desserts were good, but we had definitely peaked with the mains. I chose rhubarb, which I always do when it’s in season, and then I always wonder why because fine dining rhubarb desserts consistently fail to excite me. Dammit. Around the table there was a great lemon suet pudding, a hefty sticky cake cooked in boozy sauce and a layered chocolate tablet that was pure elegance.

Service was spot on, with all of the friendly waiters keenly knowledgeable about the provenance and creation of the dishes without appearing schooled or forced. The sommelier was helpful

and we enjoyed a great American cabernet franc with stickies to follow. The wine list is long, but the vast majority of the wines run to 3 or 4 digits. With the exception of a house wine there’s nothing under fifty. Accordingly, our celebratory meal at Dinner was about £120 per head all-in.

Dinner is a million miles from The Fat Duck. Someone posed the question: of the two, which would you come back to? We all agreed that it would be Dinner. The Fat Duck is “once in a lifetime”, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. It truly is dinner-theatre, and even with the best plays I seldom want to see the same production twice. Dinner is just a really great restaurant. Hardly cheap, but with Heston’s marvellous attention to flavour running through every dish it’s well worth it.