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My Favourite Sandwich - Yes a lame post.

Love a lightly toasted floury bap with a goodly amount of salted butter and a few strips of streaky bacon, grilled just right so that the fat has just turned crispy, then a little bit of tinned tomato smeared on and a tiny flavouring of brown sauce. Delicious.
Has to be streaky, that’s where all the taste is.
 
duke said:
Is this a canned chicken like spam?
Click to expand...
It’s basically cooked chicken breast mixed with mayonnaise and a light curry spice, although some people like to add apple or dried apricots. I’ve heard that chopped pistachio nuts go well with it too, although I’ve never tried them.

Coronation chicken won a competition held for a new recipe to celebrate the accession of Queen Elizabeth II and it’s retained its popularity with most discerning Brits ever since.
 
A fresh chunky Ciabatta roll, cut through middle about 80%, 20% is the ‘hinge’ for lid.
Smear a good layer of butter (saltless) on both halves.
Grate on some cheddar and mozzarella.
Sprinkle some sliced olives (no pips).
Some thinly sliced tomato (must be firm).
Some black pepper ground over the top.
Close lid.
Pop into microwave for 20 seconds.
Eat – just be wary of hot tomato and cheese!
Accompanied by a very large mug of coffee.

Note bacon also goes very well as a topping!
 
Phil said:
A fresh chunky Ciabatta roll, cut through middle about 80%, 20% is the ‘hinge’ for lid.
Smear a good layer of butter (saltless) on both halves.
Grate on some cheddar and mozzarella.
Sprinkle some sliced olives (no pips).
Some thinly sliced tomato (must be firm).
Some black pepper ground over the top.
Close lid.
Pop into microwave for 20 seconds.
Eat – just be wary of hot tomato and cheese!
Accompanied by a very large mug of coffee.

Note bacon also goes very well as a topping!
Click to expand...
I will give it a go.
 
Cabinetman said:
Love a lightly toasted floury bap with a goodly amount of salted butter and a few strips of streaky bacon, grilled just right so that the fat has just turned crispy, then a little bit of tinned tomato smeared on and a tiny flavouring of brown sauce. Delicious.
Has to be streaky, that’s where all the taste is.
Click to expand...
Without looking it up what is a floury bap?
 
Cabinetman said:
Hi Scott, the best cheddar I’ve found over in the us is this one, very strong and it’s got nice crunchy bits of Calcium in it. But I haven’t come across your Welsh cheese yet.

View attachment 37793
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Most of the supermarcardo's in the UK do a decent range of cheddars (unlike those in the New World, so Stephen Fry would have) but this stuff:

IMG_6143.jpeg

... from Waitrose is 'weapons grade' and our every day, go to, cheese. If you were to have a swift peek at the cheddars in the deli counter, there are one or two that are even more powerful! - Rob
 
Lurker said:
Pff! What do the French know about making cheese.
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Actually, you are quite right. Yes, there are a lot of different cheeses in France, but few of them come close to what is produced in the UK.
French cheddar is mild and boring. Wyke cheddar is often available but is twice the price. The last piece I bought was €26/kg.
Roquefort is Stilton on steroids, and Bleu d'Auvernge is good, but even so, I prefer Colston Basstet or Long Clawson stilton. The other most very excellent stilton I've had is from the cheeserie in Hartington, Derbyshire. (The only downside of that is that it is where I met my ex-wife. The cheese is still good though).
There is nothing here like Lancashire or Cheshire cheese, or, if there is, I haven't found it.
But there are lots and lots and lots of other cheeses which are either bland and boring or revoltingly strong, and you don't know what is inside the package until it is too late.
British every time. And there used to be several British Produce shops where you could get all the home stuff, but Brexit put paid to pretty much all of them.
S
 
Just an aside, according to quiz on TV last night, Davidstow Creamery in Cornwall is the largest cheese factory in the UK.
 
And the locals around here speak very highly of British cheeses of course.

My credentials for judging are lacking. Growing up the hard english cheeses I found unpalatable preferring Brie. I still find the hard crumbly cheeses difficult to digest. I now live in soft cheese country with Camembert, Pont Eveque and Livarot the local favourites. Sadly MrsP wont have cheese of any sort in the house.
 
Tesco do their own extra mature cheddar (purple label)which will give the brand names a run for their money
Joseph Heller wensledale is nice for a change too
We have a proper cheese shop locally fantastic range and fantastic prices o_Obut it just doesnt lure enough away from the supermarket in the end
 
The best cheddar I ever had came from Washington State University, and was in a tin(!!!). I expected the worst, but it was truly superb.
 
Anyone familiar with Lincolnshire Poacher cheese? They make it a couple of miles from me and it’s lovely on Lincolnshire plum bread. Mind, you have to be careful when buying the cheese because it tastes like a tangy Cheddar if it’s made from milk taken from cows who have been grazing on summer grass; if they’ve been on winter feed, the cheese is much harder and should be used like Parmesan.
 
Fresh home-baked sourdough, roast beef, a thin layer of hard salami, chopped yellow onions, the sharpest cheddar I can find, Miracle Whip (yea, yea, haters gonna hate), and stone ground mustard. Microwaved until the cheese starts to melt. With a good dark beer.
 
duke said:
Without looking it up what is a floury bap?
Click to expand...
It’s what you buy from a High Street chain in the UK called Greggs. Basically it is ultra-processed sludge designed to stick to the roof of your mouth. They are disgusting.
 
I do have a weakness for a cheese and onion sandwich from OneStop. Price is good at just £2 but don’t look too closely at the ingredients. Definitely ultra-processed
 
thetyreman said:
I love a good ploughman's sandwich, high quality mature cheddar and it's got to be sarsons silverskin onions, with a bit of salt and pepper 👌
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I love a good ploughman’s and a good pint but you can’t always rarely find this in pubs these days,
 
Interesting thread. Since getting to know an artisinal cheese (and butter) maker, wsho supplies our restaurant, I've become deeply cynical about the cheese industry. Most of it, Davidstow is an example, is industrially produced in massive bulk. It is hard to believe some of the claims: Park Farms for instance (who make the bulk Costco product and slightly different US export version) about their cheese being largely hand made. They will tell you that it is "matured in England". Strangely they don't put anything on the packet about where the milk comes from. The website suggests local free range dairy farms. There are not enough dairy farms nearby to produce the volumes they shift and free range is nonsense as the dairy herds are barn kept in winter by the vast majority of farmers who don't want their land poached up.

In the real world, ignoring the ludicrous marketing fluff suggesting artisinal roots, pasteurised blended milk arrives in bulk tankers and a good bit comes to the UK from Poland.

Part of our approach is local sourcing. So we tried a few genuine artisinal makers and ended up with one near Canterbury, where we could visit the dairy and visit the farm and farmer where they get the milk and cream from. It's superb. But not cheap, even at trade prices. True artisinal food products cost money.

There is an excellent shop in Tunbridge Wells (Petit Francais) that sells exclusive French cheeses. They are in fact very good indeed and there is a wide range. But they are easily double the price of the industrially made supermarket cheeses.

We will be experimenting a bit next year with making a house cheese and house butter. There is a farm near us that has a Jersey herd and they sell unpasteurised really fresh (just milked) milk and cream. I'm experimenting with both animal and vegetable rennet. Butter is very easy to make if you have a decent stand mixer, and superior to all supermarket bulk butter. But you do need a use for the buttermilk residue.

Commercial butter prices in the UK are silly: double that of Germany (EUs largest milk producer) currently. The UK consumer has apparently fallen for prices going up just a bit but typical block sizes falling from 250g to 200g in the usual re-sizing con. Premium butters (eg Normandy) are anything from 50% more expensive to double the cost compared with 30 months ago.
 
Interesting stuff, Adrian.
I had no idea that the U.K. imported liquid milk, given the extra transport costs the economics are difficult to understand.
But certainly our farmers need protection from such practices.
 
Lurker said:
But certainly our farmers need protection from such practices.
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The fact is the UK doesn’t produce enough milk to satisfy the demand Jim, when you look into the food supply chain the numbers are phenomenal.

As for advertising it’s there to fool the gullible, I was recently reading about chicken production the advertising would have you believe they are having a nice life roaming around a farm in small numbers, the truth is over over a billion chickens are raised for slaughter each year just for the UK market. We can’t produce that quantity in the UK to satisfy our market so again the short fall are imported.
 
Lurker said:
I had no idea that the U.K. imported liquid milk, given the extra transport costs the economics are difficult to understand.
Click to expand...
I think it's easy to over-estimate transport costs, especially when that transport is of large volumes of stuff. I don't know anything about liquid milk transport but I read an article a few years ago about container shipment and it was quite astonishing. There are apparently companies selling "Scottish fish" (with the implication being that it has relatively few "food miles") who farm the fish in Scotland, then stick them in a container ship to China, where they're cleaned up and filleted before being stuck back on a container ship to come back to the UK. Shipping them around the world twice presumably costs less than the difference in labour cost between Scottish people filleting fish and Chinese people doing the same.
 
AJB Temple said:
Interesting thread. Since getting to know an artisinal cheese (and butter) maker, wsho supplies our restaurant, I've become deeply cynical about the cheese industry. Most of it, Davidstow is an example, is industrially produced in massive bulk. It is hard to believe some of the claims: Park Farms for instance (who make the bulk Costco product and slightly different US export version) about their cheese being largely hand made. They will tell you that it is "matured in England". Strangely they don't put anything on the packet about where the milk comes from. The website suggests local free range dairy farms. There are not enough dairy farms nearby to produce the volumes they shift and free range is nonsense as the dairy herds are barn kept in winter by the vast majority of farmers who don't want their land poached up.

In the real world, ignoring the ludicrous marketing fluff suggesting artisinal roots, pasteurised blended milk arrives in bulk tankers and a good bit comes to the UK from Poland.
Click to expand...
Industrially produced it may be, but the stuff I referred to is a decent, every day cheese and, if you look at the packet again, produced from 100% British milk. If their milk, or even part of it came from the Continent, there's no way (Trade Descriptions Act) that Davidstow could label it as they do - Rob

The same with Tesco Organic milk, which is what I imbibe. It do sayeth on the back label, made "using from milk from the UK"
 
Woodbloke said:
The same with Tesco Organic milk, which is what I imbibe. It do sayeth on the back label, made "using from milk from the UK"
Click to expand...
Once the Polish, Dutch or German tanker has pumped into the UK bulk tank, it is mixed, some of it is filtered, it may well be re-pasteurised and then it is "milk from the UK". There is a lot of marketing garbage surrounding industrial food production.

It is much the same as "made in Germany" which is another misleading phrase used a lot.....

Of course, we can all believe whatever we wish. UK dairy farmers are undercut by European bulk milk supplies. Industrail producers are quite focussed on price. No one is more focussed on price than the likes of Tesco. In some cases they will not even agree a price payable to farmers until after delivery so farmers have literally no idea what they will get on their supply contract - but they get penalised if they don't deliver. Apples are a prime example. There is a reason why Kent orchards are being grubbed up left right and centre.

Right now Fenland celery is in season and superb. But the stuff in Sainsbury, Waityrosy, Tescosy, and Lidllaldi is all from Spain. Soon it will be Morocco as the land is so cheap. We are so used to cheap junk that we don't care about our farming industry and our children will regret what we have slipped into being dependent on imports as we build housing estates on productive land. You can probably tell I feel strongly about this. I made a conscious decision not to buy into the destructive practices in food production.
 
AJB Temple said:
Once the Polish, Dutch or German tanker has pumped into the UK bulk tank, it is mixed, some of it is filtered, it may well be re-pasteurised and then it is "milk from the UK". There is a lot of marketing garbage surrounding industrial food production.

It is much the same as "made in Germany" which is another misleading phrase used a lot.....

Of course, we can all believe whatever we wish. UK dairy farmers are undercut by European bulk milk supplies. Industrail producers are quite focussed on price. No one is more focussed on price than the likes of Tesco. In some cases they will not even agree a price payable to farmers until after delivery so farmers have literally no idea what they will get on their supply contract - but they get penalised if they don't deliver. Apples are a prime example. There is a reason why Kent orchards are being grubbed up left right and centre.

Right now Fenland celery is in season and superb. But the stuff in Sainsbury, Waityrosy, Tescosy, and Lidllaldi is all from Spain. Soon it will be Morocco as the land is so cheap. We are so used to cheap junk that we don't care about our farming industry and our children will regret what we have slipped into being dependent on imports as we build housing estates on productive land. You can probably tell I feel strongly about this. I made a conscious decision not to buy into the destructive practices in food production.
Click to expand...
No comment though on the 100% British milk in the Davidstow cheese?:ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO: - Rob
 
Good post Adrian!
We used to get our milk fresh from the local goat hearder, alas European regulations has closed these down as it’s no longer profitable, same thing with the village cheese factory.
The big corporations with there powerful lobbyists are culling the small businesses
 
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