My long-time reader (Mark Locke, apparently) knows my views if you want someone to cook the steak for you: book a table at Hawksmoor, London’s best meat restaurant. You cannot go wrong with their offerings; it is truly, amazingly, stunningly good meat.

So what if one has to cook beef one’s self? The destination of choice is where Hawksmoor score their quality goods: the Ginger Pig. They have other types of meat, including some great sausages, but their beef is what draws us to their stand in Borough Market. These are the sirloin steaks we had last night:

 

Don’t they look great? They tasted even better. GP give their steaks a proper dose of dry ageing and this means they burst with throbbing flavour. Truly wonderful. When you have meat of this quality you really feel the need to get a charcoal grill installed to experience it at its best. Yeah, I like noshing on such wonderful meat.

There are a couple of other places which I would suggest you visit. The Wild Beef Company, who also have a stand in Borough Market, have some high-quality meat. However, they sell most of the serious cuts to restaurants so if you need something specific it is best to ring up in advance and ask if you can place a reservation for the meat you require.

Finally, for those of us in horrible South-East London you could do worse than drop by Dring’s on Royal Hill in Greenwich. They have served us well with quality fillet steak and some great ribs of beef. A good place to stop by.

I am sure there is other good beef in London; if you have found a source treasure it and make friends with the butcher as quickly as possible. Meat, the best stuff to put in your mouth!

You may have read the story about keeping cured and processed meat out of children’s lunchboxes in order to prevent them getting bowel cancer (which is here). What a drivelly pile of scaremongering toss.

“Eating too much over decades can raise the risk of bowel cancer”, say the sponging, self-publicising bastards who only come out with crap like this to try and justify their stinking, whining existence. What is ‘too much’? They certainly don’t know. By how much is the risk raised? They don’t know that either. This story is purest bullshit.

What really pisses me off is that they tell parents not to give children such meat to ‘prevent them from developing a taste for it’. This is so infuriating. We must deny children the pleasure of wonderful, flavourful, interesting food and make them picky eaters just to possibly minimise an unknown risk of developing one particular disease at some unspecified point in the future.

This kind of bollocks makes it into the news pretty much every day. It is rubbish and we must recognise it as such.

Look at that lovely ham! How could anyone deny a child such health-giving pleasure?

Nick Ross, colleague of Daniel’s, gave us this bar of 100% cocoa chocolate from La Maison du Chocolat in Paris. I tasted a little bit as I was adding some to some food I was cooking and thought it worth posting a brief report. It has a rich, layered array of flavours, the primary of which is its incredible bitterness. It is not too dry or powdery, but maintains a good, mouth-filling richness as you eat it. Reasonably complex too. This is an interesting bar of chocolate.

Most of these 100% cocoa chocolates are too powdery and too bitter, this has enough balance to be really enjoyable. Probably best for cooking, all told, but the odd square when I need perking up will be sucked.

These Thai salads can be so delicious, the key often seems to make them mind-buggeringly hot. This one cries out for bird’s eye chillies and the very best scallops you can find. It is just so tasty! You will need:

400g scallops
The juice of 2 limes
A pinch of salt
2 tablespoons of fish sauce
6 bird’s eye chillies pounded
6 red shallots finely chopped
1 stalk of lemongrass finely chopped
4 kaffir lime leaves finely chopped
Plenty of mint and coriander leaves finely chopped

Clean the scallops, slice them in half cross-wise. Knead the lime juice and salt into the scallops and marinate for 3-4 minutes until the scallops go opaque. Add fish sauce and pounded chillies to make a sour, hot and salty dressing. Toss with the remainder of the ingredients and serve. It’ll look like this:

As far as light meals go this is pretty much as good as it gets: totally tasty, enlivening and exciting. We will cook this many times in the future.

Nahm received some mixed reviews when it opened, but it is also Europe’s only Thai restaurant with a Michelin star. Our lunchtime visit showed us it was worth that star, and we were pleased with their modest pricing policy.

The restaurant has a few lunchtime offers: two courses for £15, three for £20 (these two were from a more restricted choice) or a £30 set meal with five courses. We thought this last option would give us the greatest range of food to try. Daniel commented that he liked the focus of the menu, they were not trying to do too much.

We would normally only drink beer in a Thai establishment, but a quick look at the intelligently chosen and reasonably priced wine list made us decide to get a couple of halves of Riesling. Rarely have we experienced such a choice wine list; this set us in the mood for fun. We like fun, don’t you?

We were served some little nibbles as an amuse bouche: dried shrimp and peanut caramelised in palm sugar on pieces of mandarin and pineapple. These had a strong, rich flavour which kept on developing more interest as you chewed. The texture was truly amazing; it was more than just the flavour of the ingredients that worked well together. The fact that I really hate peanut in food and yet loved these little morsels shows how good they were.

The four main courses all came at the same time. There was a hot and sour clam soup which had a strong lemon grass character. There were a reasonable amount of clams in the broth and also some wonderful Thai shallots which were cooked to melting softness. When one thinks of Thai food it is normally in terms of fresh, distinct and vibrant flavours. The soup (and the next two dishes) had those qualities, but also a depth of complexity that made them really stand out as being a step ahead.

Quail salad with smoky chilli sauce was absolutely delicious, and even though it was quite mind-bendingly hot this did not mask the intricacy of flavours. You know you are alive when you eat food like this. The spicy richness of the guinea fowl red curry was also expressive and perfectly balanced. I found the Thai aubergines, something that normally bores me (because they are vegetables), in this to be flavoursome and expertly cooked.

Stir-fried squid with garlic, galangal and spring onions was our last main course. It was more focussed on purity of fresh flavours, but it was none the worse for that. The squid was brilliantly prepared, not even remotely chewy or tough; it melted on your palate.

The menu included a couple of desserts, the coconut cake with rambutans in jasmine syrup and shaved young coconut was particularly good. Given the quality of the food we were quite surprised that we dined alone for most of our meal. Sure, a Tuesday lunchtime in August may not be the busiest of times, but a restaurant serving top Thai tucker and winning wine at perfectly pleasing prices should be busier than this. Go for lunch there, it will be obscenely better and not much more expensive than Addie’s Thai Cafe.

David Thompson, the head chef at Nahm, has written the definitive book on Thai food. If you want to try and create such marvellous food at home this is the tome you need.

Contact details: Nahm, The Halkin, Halkin Street, SE1X Telephone: +44 (0)20 7333 1234

I don’t feel the need to rant terribly much about this, as I’ve done so before. However, I thought I would bring you a little video gem from the excellent BBC comedy The Mitchell and Webb Look.

Perhaps next time I go to a vegetarian’s place for dinner I should formulate some ludicrous dietary requirements myself. I like the idea of only eating foie gras and truffles.

Inspired by the Scotch eggs we had at the Hind’s Head in Bray recently, Daniel decided to try making some himself. Sillfield Farm sausages are so good he could not use anything else for the sausage meat coating. Squeezing that meat out of their sheaths is quite fun. You will need:

12 quail’s eggs
600g interesting sausage meat
125g of breadcrumbs
3 eggs
Flour
Pepper and salt (if using inadequately interesting sausage meat)

Put the quail’s eggs into boiling water and let boil for two minutes. Then plunge the eggs into ice-cold water to let them cool rapidly. Peel the quail’s eggs under water when cold.

Roll 50g of sausage meat into a ball. Flatten and wrap around a quail’s egg; try not to maul the eggs.

Roll the the Scotch egg in flour, dip in the beaten egg and finally roll in the breadcrumbs. Put the Scotch eggs in the fridge or freezer for 5 minutes, and then dip in egg and bread crumbs again. They will look like this:

Deep fry in vegetable oil at 170°C for three minutes or until dark golden brown, then put in a hot oven for a few minutes. Enjoy!

 

Steak tartare is what people who enjoy meat eat. You need terribly serious fillet for this. Best to get a tail piece (which will cost less money), but still no skimping on quality. So, get about 350g of steak per person, let it warm to room temperature and chop it up finely removing any fat you can see. It’ll look like this:

You also need to chop up some cornichons, shallots (banana shallots ideally), nonpareille capers and parsley. This time we also chopped up some pickled silverskin onions. Furthermore, you’ll need an egg yolk per person, some Dijon mustard, Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce. This stuff, basically:

Then mix the meat with the other ingredients, tasting as you go. If you serve it with pommes dauphinoises it’ll look like this when you’ve finished:

Finally, a top tip from David Strange:

This can provide you with an incredible method of making friends with a butcher. If you cannot be bothered to chop up your own steak you can ask a butcher to put it through their mincer. They may look a bit surprised, but assure them it is for steak tartare and you know what you are doing. When they come to show you the minced fillet steak, grab a pinch and eat it right there and then. You’ll have gained a friend for life and, we hope, a decent discount on your future purchases.

We had another excellent meal at Hawksmoor last week (our original review is here and the follow up is here). The key is to go on a Monday when they only charge a fiver corkage (per bottle, obviously) if you take your own wine (this is what we took). We have definitely decided that the sirloin on the bone is the steak of choice; it has the tenderness of fillet but a lot more flavour. That being said, Non-Stinky Jeff and Dan’s Chateaubriand was really tasty. Here are the pictures.

    

This is the best meat in London. The last two times I’ve been I’ve had the sirloin and it almost, but not quite, ranks with Pedro’s ox chops at Casa Nicolas in Tolosa. Much as I agree the limits of pleasure are yet to be defined or reached, I cannot imagine putting better meat in my mouth than Pedro’s.

This worked a treat with the added flavour-enhancing ingredients, so I’m posting the recipe. It is a dead-easy dish to knock up. To make it you will need:

1.5Kg unsmoked streaky bacon in one piece complete with rind
A bottle of passable white wine
750ml fresh chicken stock
500g Puy lentils
15 shallots peeled but left whole
10 sticks of celery cut into batons 
3 carrots peeled and cut into batons
2 dessertspoons of butter
A couple of bay leaves
A couple of springs of thyme

For the mustard sauce:
150ml double cream
A heaped dessertspoon of Dijon mustard

Cut the rind off the bacon and put it in your stew pot. You cook this with the rind because it adds flavour, you don’t eat it. Put the lump of bacon in, add the chicken stock and white wine then heat it up. Once it begins to simmer turn the heat down to the lowest setting where the surface just quivers. Simmer it for half an hour at this temperature.

Once this half hour is up add the lentils, shallots, celery, carrots, bay leaves and thyme, bring back to the boil then simmer at the lowest heat for another hour.

Then take the bacon out of the pot and slice it into thick slices. Stir the butter into the lentils and vegetables to add richness. Serve wonderful, rich and tasty slices pork with the delicious lentil and vegetable stew. The mustard sauce just needs the two ingredients mixing and people can help themselves to this.