Countries – Page 6 – food by sole

2nd February 2022

First attempt at making Altamura bread: I made a rock

As I mentioned, I have a stash of Italian flours at home and I’m attempting to make breads in different Italian styles. There’s more than pizza, ciabatta and focaccia!

My first attempt was to make a bread in the style of the pane di Altamura. But I was too impatient and didn’t wait until my semi-dormant starter was sufficiently lively again, so I made a nice looking rustic rock. It smells amazing, but it didn’t rise a lot, so it’s quite compact inside (it can be eaten in thin slices, haha!)

A look inside the Altamura bread: it is too dense

That said I got to practice handling the dough and folding it, so there will be less new concepts to learn at once the next time I attempt making this.

31st January 2022

Endo at the Rotunda

We last went to Japan in 2019. And I don’t think I need to tell you what happened next! Either way, we do really miss the country and the Japanese hospitality.

Thankfully, we can get a piece of it in London: Endo Katuzoshi’s restaurant Endo at the Rotunda in White City blurs the line between reality and illusion.

Is he a chef? Is he a magician? Maybe both at once!

28th January 2022

Scone spam

Anyone who runs a website which allows comments to be posted will be familiar with the neverending stream of spam comments.

They are easy for a human to spot, mostly because they normally talk about things that have nothing to do with your post or site at all. Often they’re nothing more than a collection of random words and then some links to pornographic, drugs, scams or other similarly illicit websites (or try to install malware in your computer). And typically the comment’s author name and email address are a collection of random letters too (or they have numbers on it).

So, it does look like something a bot created. The automated crap can be sensed from a long distance.

The problem is that there are SO MANY comments. It is just so time consuming to remove them. Fortunately there exist solutions such as Akismet that help you automatically filter the trash out.

But sometimes legitimate comments end up marked as spam. So I have a look at the spam comments from time to time to make sure the good comments aren’t lost forever, as the spam gets automatically deleted after a number of days—otherwise the database would eventually explode with rubbish.

Today I just did that, but this time I spotted something unusual: spam which talked about scones, in my Skulls & bones (or scones & scones) post.

Now that is interesting! Spam about baking! How thoughtful!

3rd January 2022

Falling into the Italian bread hole

Happy new year everybody!

After the break, we’re back with a lot of curiosity and interest in perfecting our cooking.

May this be the year in which you master anything that has been bugging you, or maybe the year in which you learn something new that you did not even know existed and it brings you lots of pleasure!

Which in my case seems to be Italian flour and breads. Brace yourselves…

15th December 2021

Hotaru

We had just arrived in Valencia and wanted to have lunch, but hadn’t booked anything. It was almost 15:00 and I was a bit fearful that we would not be able to find anywhere to eat.

Then we walked past this place, which we had spotted the last time we were here, but didn’t have time to visit.

We were very pleasantly surprised that the staff saw no problem on us joining so late, also found us a quiet place to sit at the counter, and were perfectly fine to serve us the tasting menu, even if there was only one hour left until the kitchen closed.