In SA you also get Bunny Chow, which is basically a loaf of bread with the top cut off, the insides scooped out and then filled up with Indian food and the top replaced. The Indian immigrants weren't allowed to sell food to blacks, so they would sell it out the back door, disguised in a loaf of bread. Ingenious, tasty and you can use the top as a sort of spoon.
Post-pub nosh neckfiller: The gargantuan Gatsby
It's February, and the weather's crap this side of the equator, so travel with us if you will to South Africa's sunny Cape Town for a wobbly dining experience so substantial it's more of a team sport than a post-pub dining exercise. Yes indeed, prepare to get your laughing gear round the "Gatsby", recommended by reader Simon …
COMMENTS
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Friday 12th February 2016 15:06 GMT Sooty
food hygene people!
You've got your raw meat not only on the same board, but touching your lettuce and practically touching the bread, neither of which will be cooked.
While you'll probably be ok with steak, it's still a pretty poor showing and well deserving of a day being unable to go further than sprinting distance from a toilet.
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Friday 12th February 2016 17:46 GMT Manolo
Re: food hygene people!
It might seem counter-intuitive, but wooden boards are actually more hygienic than plastic. Bacteria can form bio-films that cling to plastics very well. (Also a problem with urinary catheters en iv's for prolonged use)
This is not the case with wood. Glass has other disadvantages in kitchen use: not friendly on your knives and prone to breaking.
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Saturday 13th February 2016 12:51 GMT Paul Renault
Re: food hygene people!
Hear, hear!
Most wood also have built-in chemicals which kill bacteria. FFS, how to you think trees manage to stay upright in filthy, bacteria-rich environments for decades, sometimes centuries?
In addition, on a wooden cutting board, bacteria sink in, making them unable to infect the food, and causing them to die. A Canadian scientist, decades ago, who was trying to show just how much safer plastic cutting boards were, had to develop/modify his sampling methods because he was having a very difficult time getting infected samples off of the wooden cutting boards. He had no problems collecting samples off of the plastic ones.
He came to the conclusion, along with many other researchers, that wooden cutting boards are perfectly fine. You'd think that by now, the meme that a wooden cutting board is unsanitary while a plastic one is inherently safer would have been dead, dead, dead.
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Friday 12th February 2016 18:06 GMT TeeCee
Re: food hygene people!
Actually, I'm 100% sure that I remember seeing it stated that, while them may be the roolz, it's bollocks.
Apparently a natural wood board kills bacteria on its own, something the glass and plastic varieties do not. Thus, unless you have access to an industrial boiling dishwasher to clean the things, wood chopping boards are the way to go.
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Friday 12th February 2016 18:23 GMT Justicesays
Re: food hygene people!
Putting meat on wooden chopping boards is fine, and may be better than plastic ones.
sources:
UK food standards agency
http://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/multimedia/pdfs/fsw11myths.pdf (Q5)
Scientific research
http://faculty.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/faculty/docliver/Research/cuttingboard.htm
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Sunday 14th February 2016 10:48 GMT MonkeyCee
Re: food hygene people!
When I did city and guilds cooking course (2002) wood boards where not only OK, they where recommended. You've got to care for them a bit differently to plastic, mainly leaving to dry in a fashion that doesn't have a business side soaking wet.
I also never experienced a working eatery where all C+G standards and H+S where actually followed. The industrial kitchen came close (Wishbone) but it seems pretty impossible to follow every single thing.
Knew a few chaps who worked in the meat works, wooden boards there too. They tried plastic ones, but they all ended up turning black and slightly slimey within a week or two. Apparently too hard to clean, and they aren't too gentle with the cuts, so you could get pretty serious gouges out of the plastic.
I didn't even think glass chopping boards where "real", I thought they where for presenting stuff on, like cheese or desserts. I'd rather prep straight onto a steel work surface than glass *shudder*.
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Friday 12th February 2016 15:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: food hygene people!
So how do you get on with Steak Tartare then? do you serve it on a separate plate to everything else? What about when it is combined and in your stomach.
Hinder & Stop ('elf N'safety) threw a wobbly at us serviing the above on the same place until we pointed out the fact that you had to eat it along with the uncooked salad/dressing.
But rules is rules.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 15:05 GMT x 7
Re: food hygene people!
the shittiest day of my life was due to a chef at a kabab shop preparing the salad for my burger after cutting up a goat carcass without washing his hands
he was a (probably illegal) immigrant from the muslim bloc, too stupid to know better, and I was too pissed to notice what he was doing
the beer and bugs combined resulted in a 24-hour session on the loo with liquid being projected from both ends near-constantly. I lost close to a stone in weight in a day
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Friday 12th February 2016 17:36 GMT Crafty volt 7
Re: food hygene people!
You need to note the ingredients..... That peri peri sauce is hot. Not only that, it contains an anzyme that sends a pretty strong "vacate the colon" message to the brain. You therefore are smart if sitting on a ceramic throne whilst consuming said Gatsby delicacy. If you stay in the Taj in Cape Town they can cater to this spectacle with a suitable tray and gas mask clad butler bearing copious amounts of suitable Namibian Breweries libations to put out the fire that will be raging from your lips to your nether orifice....it goes without saying that foregoing "hygene" comes with the territory and scout paradigms prevail (be prepared)....haggle over the finest soft quality asswipe when you check in and just mention your culinary ambitions while pressing a few benjy's into said hotel chappies paw....they will light up with a deep and knowing understanding....
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Friday 12th February 2016 15:56 GMT Tom 7
Par frying chips
As a kid my local chippy used to par fry the chips for the next session in the cooling fryer at the end of the lunch session. And then they soaked them in milk till 5 o'Clock opening, That's milk by the way - milk not that shit you get in the shops now. Milk from a cow - pasteurised and into bottles. Fucknose what they do to it now.
Then they fried em to near brown. Used to get people travelling 60 miles to get them chips.
The only beef you need with chips like that is the rendered down stuff you cook em in but I dare say they would brighten up this and you've got a lot of the sharp knife work out of the way before you get to the pub.
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Friday 12th February 2016 16:32 GMT Robert Helpmann??
Re: Par frying chips
Frying potatoes twice with a complete cool down in between produces better texture in the finished product as the starches will set after the first heating but will not turn gluey when reheated. It also makes it quicker for restaurants to get food to table. I am not sure what might be going on with the milk there, but I will have to give it a try if only for the novelty.
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Friday 12th February 2016 19:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Par frying chips
I thought mushrooms cooked in milk was odd until I tried some for breakfast.
Milk is somewhat underrated. Poach some spring onions (scallions for the locals) in milk & butter, then stir the lot into mashed potato. Instant "champ", great Irish accompaniment to almost anything.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 14:46 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: Par frying chips
> Frying potatoes twice with a complete cool down in between produces better texture
My wifes maternal grandfather used to run a grocery/food shop back in the late '40s/early '50s - apparently they did a mass chip cook early in the day then let them cool and put them in the fridge. That meant they could then cook to order (more or less) in small batches at lunchtime & evening-meal time and get much better chips.
Apparently MatGf got very very good at hand-cutting the potatoes with very little wastage.
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Friday 12th February 2016 16:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Par frying chips
Every decent chippy, restaurant etc. should par fry chips.
Every decent cook book recommends par frying and every deep fat fryer I have ever bought (OK, all three of them) recommends it too.
I can only assume that those to whom the art of par frying is a surprise has never made chips properly.
Sadly Beef Dripping for chips is a long lost practice in many places that claim to be 'traditional' chippies but there are still a few enlightened masters of the delicacy still out there.
And anyone who doesn't put mint sauce in mushy peas is a heathen.
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Friday 12th February 2016 17:30 GMT Zog_but_not_the_first
Re: Par frying chips
Triple cooking is well worth the faff IMHO. Glassy hard outside and sweet, soft and hot inside. I've discovered that you can go a long way to the authentic "cooked in beef dripping" flavour of yore by adding a dollop of dripping to a good quality neutral tasting cooking oil too.
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Friday 12th February 2016 18:13 GMT Robert Sneddon
Re: Par frying chips
There's a reason chip pan fires was one of the top five causes of house fires in Scotland for a long time -- the second pass in the liquid cow has to be at a temperature that is damn close to flashover. My Dad didn't know the the old radio ham phrase "tune for maximum smoke" but he always kept a wet towel handy when making chips. Oh, and he grew his own tatties too, Maris Pipers, a great chipping potato but now, Ghod Preserve Us, an "heirloom" variety. I blame the English and their foofy King Edwards.
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Friday 12th February 2016 18:07 GMT Leo-pinkus-pantherus
Whenwe cow meat
That's nothing, back in the day, on my four billion hectare cattle farm (in Rhodesia), with my 2.5 trillion cows, and my eight million servants, our cows would produce "petite" fillets that weighed 2Kg for every Gatsby we made, with a gallon of Peri-Peri and four rolls of Carlton asswipe standing by with several gallons of chilled Windhoek Export, it was sure to be a very "enlightening" day.....ahhhhh, those were the dayz!!
We must have eaten all the cows and salad it was so good.... Went back the other week and all I saw was red sand everywhere....???
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