Tag: apple

Meet the Hasselback Potato

21 December 2022

Winter Solstice is upon us once again so it’s time to kick off the holiday season. If you’re looking for something a bit different for your festive feast this year, then look no further than the Hasselback potato, an attractive dish that tastes like a jacket potato crossed with a roast potato.

This method of preparation involves cutting the potato into thin slices that fan out while baking. It can be used for other vegetables like beetroot, carrot and butternut squash, as well as a sweet version using fruits like apple and quince.

Hasselback potato with a pasty and salad

Hasselback potatoes originated in Sweden with the dish featuring in a 1929 recipe book “The Princesses’ Cookbook” by Jenny Åkerström. In 1953. Lief Elisson, a rookie chef at Stockholm’s Hasselbacken restaurant, revived this method for preparing the humble spud.

Preparing the Hasselback

To prepare the fruit or vegetables of your choice, place chopsticks or wooden spoon handles on either side and cut into thin slices until the blade hits the wood.

Ingredients

  • Four medium potatoes
  • 25 ml olive oil
  • One teaspoon rosemary or thyme (fresh if available or dried)
  • One teaspoon cumin seeds

Method

  • Put two chopsticks or the handles of two wooden spoons on either side of the potato. Cut into 1-2 mm slices, cutting until the blade hits the wood.
  • Put the potatoes in an ovenproof dish with the cut side facing up. Drizzle liberally with olive oil and sprinkle cumin seeds and thyme (or rosemary) over them.
  • Bake in a pre-heated oven at 180 c for one hour. Serve on their own or as part of a main course with a pasty or nut roast along with your choice of side vegetables or a salad.
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Le Cidre Nouveau est Arrivé !

8 November 2018

We finally got round to tasting our first batch of cider made with apples sourced from Almaty, widely acknowledged as the place where the ancestors of today’s apples evolved. We’re pleased to announce that the experiment was a success!

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We used locally grown aport apples, a large red and yellow coloured variety, that grows around Almaty, Kazakhstan. a big clue as to the apple’s origins can be found in the name Almaty which translates from the Kazakh as ‘the place of apples.’

For the experiment, we used five kilos of fruit, which was pressed to produce around three litres of juice. We used a juicer and a sieve with some cloth to press and filter the leftover apple pulp to squeeze out a bit more liquid.

Then the juice was poured into a clean 5-litre water container. We allowed nature to take its course, and no yeast was added to aid the fermentation process. We made an improvised airlock using a balloon with a pinhole in it (to allow the gas to escape from the fermenting liquid whilst keeping unwanted bacteria out).

Fermentation took around two weeks and then the cider was siphoned off into clean wine bottles, where it was left to mature for a year or so. The resulting cider, about 1.7 litres was produced from this batch, was a dry, pale-coloured liquid that went down all too easily.