Simit with lemon and thyme-baked feta

If you've ever toyed with the idea of buying a wood-fired oven Genevieve Taylor's new book The Ultimate Wood Fired Oven Cookbook should persuade you. (And it didn't even cost a fortune. She built it herself!)

The recipes which go way beyond pizza are brilliant too* but I picked this intriguing Turkish bread which she serves with baked feta cheese which sounds ridiculously good*.

Gen writes: "Simit are delicious bagel-shaped bread rings from Turkey, liberally covered with golden sesame seeds and often served for breakfast with cheese and olive oil. Here I serve them with baked feta cheese as I love the soft, almost mousse-like texture it gets when it’s hot, perfect for spreading on the crusty bread. Eaten with a salad of ripe tomatoes and a few black olives, this makes a perfectly simple lunch."

220–230°C (425–450°F) MAKES 4

For the simit

400g (3 cups) strong white bread flour

1 tsp instant yeast

1 tsp fine salt

300ml (11⁄4 cups) hand-hot water 2 tbsp olive oil, plus more for shaping the dough

1 tbsp pomegranate molasses

2 tbsp sesame seeds

For the feta

1 x 200g (7oz) block of feta

2 tbsp olive oil

a few sprigs of fresh thyme, leaves, picked

zest from 1⁄2 a lemon

freshly ground black pepper

You need a fire that has reached a high, steady baking temperature of about 220–230°C (425–450°F), with no live flame, just glowing embers OR if you don't have a wood-fired oven Gen says you can bake the bread in a conventional oven at 220°C or 200°C in a fan oven.

Put the flour, yeast and salt into a mixing bowl and stir together until mixed. Pour in the water and oil and stir together until you have a ragged, loose ball of dough. Cover loosely with a clean tea towel and set aside for 10 minutes for the flour to hydrate.

Lightly oil the worktop and tip the dough on to it, scraping out all the loose bits from the bowl. Spread a little oil on the inside of the bowl and set aside. Use your oiled hands to very lightly knead the dough for 10 seconds, then put back into the bowl and leave to rest for 10 more minutes. Repeat this 10-second knead and 10-minute rest twice more. Cover the bowl and leave to prove on the worktop for an hour. You can also slide it into the fridge and prove it slowly for 4–6 hours if you prefer.

Tip out the dough on to a lightly floured worktop and divide it into eight even pieces. Take two pieces and roll them into long snakes, about 1–1 1⁄2cm (1⁄2–5⁄8in) thick. If the dough snakes are springing back and won’t stay in shape, leave them for a few minutes to relax, then try again.

Twist the two pieces together like a rope, then coil into a circle and pinch the two ends together to join so they look like twisted bagels. Set on a large oiled baking sheet and repeat with the remaining dough so you end up with 4 well-spaced simit. Brush the tops lightly with the pomegranate molasses and sprinkle liberally with the sesame seeds. Set aside to prove again for another 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, get the block of feta ready for baking by sliding it into a small baking dish. Drizzle over the olive oil, and sprinkle on the thyme and lemon zest. Season with a good grind of black pepper.

Once the dough has finished its second prove, slide the tray into the hot oven. Cook for 15 minutes, then check them, turning the tray around if necessary, so they cook evenly. At the same time, slide in the dish of feta alongside. Leave both to bake for a further 10–15 minutes.

Serve immediately, while the feta is hot and melting.

*the Mexican sweetcorn salad (Esquites) we had at the launch is also ridiculously good

What to drink: If you served this as Gen suggests with a salad of ripe tomatoes and some olives a glass of dry rosé would go down well or, if you can find one, the crisp Turkish white, Narince.

Recipe extract from The Ultimate Wood Fired Oven Cookbook by Genevieve Taylor published by Quadrille at £15. Photography © Jason Ingram.

Tomato Tonnato

Few recipes are truly original but this twist on the classic vitello tonnato from Ed Smith of Rocket and Squash, using tomatoes as the base instead of roast veal is just inspired.

It comes from his brilliant book On the Side which, as the title suggests, is all about side dishes.

Ed writes: This might seem a surprising combination, but a fishy, umami-rich tonnato balances tomato’s natural acidity beautifully, punctuated by a sprinkling of salty and sour capers. I’ve enjoyed this with veal chops, pork belly, monkfish and cod, and I’m sure there are many other fine matches.

You’re likely to have some tonnato sauce left over, but it’s not efficient to make it in a smaller quantity. Happily, it keeps well for 2–3 days if covered and refrigerated. Use it to lubricate cold meats or roast lamb or as a flavoured mayonnaise in sandwiches. The tomatoes must be at room temperature and sliced thinly so that there’s plenty of cut surface area for the sauce to cling to.

Time needed: 30 minutes to an hour

Serves 6

6 medium (about 500g) tomatoes

2 tablespoons capers

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Tonnato sauce

50g tinned anchovies in oil

160g tinned tuna, drained (120g drained weight)

2 teaspoons fish sauce

1 garlic clove, chopped

2 teaspoons red wine vinegar

3 egg yolks

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

100g light olive oil

First, make the tonnato sauce. Put the anchovies with their oil, along with all the other sauce ingredients except the olive oil, in a blender or small food processor. Pulse, then blitz for about 1 minute, or until smooth. Add the olive oil in a steady drizzle until the mixture has completely emulsified and is smooth and glossy. Transfer it to a bowl and leave it in the fridge for 30 minutes to an hour. It will firm up a little in that time – not essential, but nice.

Spoon 4–5 tablespoons of the tonnato sauce over a large serving plate. Slice the tomatoes thinly and layer them on top of the sauce. Add a good grind or three of black pepper, and just a little salt (the sauce and capers are themselves quite salty). Sprinkle the capers over the top and serve.

What to drink

I drank an albarino with this on one occasion and a dry rosé on another. Both worked really well, as would most unoaked Italian white wines.

Extract taken from On the Side: A Sourcebook of Inspiring Side Dishes by Ed Smith (Bloomsbury, £20)

Photography © Joe Woodhouse

Raw cauliflower, mushroom and feta salad

This delicious salad is inspired by one I ate in a brilliant fast food restaurant called Food Chain in Montreal last year. They shred the vegetables to order then serve them in bowls with an accompanying dressing and topping (mixed seeds in this case).

You pour over the dressing when you’re ready to eat which keeps the salad crunchy and fresh.

I thought it would be easy to recreate at home and it is. You just need to slice your vegetables really thinly. For two I’d suggest using a mandolin - for larger numbers a food processor with a slicing attachment. Needless to say your ingredients need to be super-fresh. This is not a salad to make with the fridge leftovers!

Serves 2 as a main meal, 4 as a side

1 small or half a medium red or sweet onion* (about 50g)
Half a medium-sized cauliflower (about 250g)
A good big handful of flat leaf parsley
125g button mushrooms
100g feta cheese, crumbled
Mixed seeds (optional)

For the dressing

2 tbsp lemon juice
Grated rind half a lemon (about 1 tsp)
5 tbsp olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

First make the dressing. Put the lemon juice and rind into a bowl with a little salt and plenty of black pepper and whisk in the olive oil. (Or shake all the ingredients together in a screw top jar

Peel the onion and slice finely on a mandolin. Discard any chunkier pieces. Soak the onion slices in cold water for 10 minutes then drain and pat dry.

Break the cauliflower into large florets removing the thicker parts of the stalk and mandolin them too

Chop the parsley coarsely removing any tougher stems

Wipe and finely slice the mushrooms

Put all the ingredients in a large bowl together with the crumbled feta. Whisk the dressing again and pour it over then toss all the ingredients together. Sprinkle with seeds, if using. Eat immediately.

What to drink: I see this as a healthy post-weekend option so I personally would drink sparkling water with it but you could serve a glass of crisp dry white wine like a Picpoul de Pinet or an albarino.

Shanghai red-braised pork with eggs

If you're looking for something to make for the Chinese New Year try this marvellous recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Fish & Rice (Note: Fuchsia recommends you make it a day ahead.)

Fuchsia writes: Red-braised pork, in which chunks of belly pork are simmered with soy sauce, rice wine and sugar, is beloved across China, and there are many regional variations. In Jiangnan, and especially Shanghai, they like theirs dark, sleek and seductively sweet. The pork is only cooked for about an hour in total, so the meat and fat retain a little spring in their step. A secondary ingredient is often added, such as bamboo shoot, deep-fried tofu, cuttlefish, salted fish or, as in this recipe, hard-boiled eggs. The dish is a perfect accompaniment to plain white rice; I do recommend that you serve it also with something light and refreshing, such as stir-fried greens.

At the Dragon Well Manor restaurant in Hangzhou, they call this dish Motherly Love Pork because of an old local story. Once upon a time, they say, there was a woman whose son had travelled to Beijing to sit the imperial civil service examinations. Eagerly awaiting his return, she cooked up his favourite dish, a slow-simmered stew of pork and eggs. But the road was long and the travelling uncertain, so her son didn’t arrive when expected, and she took the pot off the stove and went to bed. The next day, she warmed up the stew and waited again for him, but he didn’t arrive. By the time her son actually reached home on the third day, the stew had been heated up three times, and the meat was inconceivably tender and unctuous, the sauce dark and profound.

Shanghai red-braised pork with eggs - shang hai hong shao rou 上海红烧肉

6 eggs, small if possible

20g fresh ginger, skin on

1 spring onion, white part only

750g pork belly, skin on

1 tbsp cooking oil

1 star anise

A small piece of cassia bark

3 tbsp Shaoxing wine

700ml stock or hot water

2 tbsp light soy sauce

1½ tbsp plus 1 tsp dark soy sauce

3 tbsp caster sugar or 40g rock sugar

Hard-boil the eggs in a pan of boiling water, then cool and shell them. In each egg, make 6–8 shallow slashes lengthways to allow the flavours of the stew to enter. Smack the ginger and spring onion gently with the flat side of a Chinese cleaver or a rolling pin to loosen their fibres.

Put the pork in a pan, cover with cold water, bring to the boil over a high flame and boil for 5 minutes. Drain and rinse it under the cold tap. When cool enough to handle, cut the meat through the skin into 2–3 cm cubes (if your piece of belly is thick, you may want to cut each piece in half so they end up more cube-like).

Heat the oil in a seasoned wok over a high flame. Add the ginger, spring onion, star anise and cassia and stir-fry briefly until they smell wonderful. Add the pork and fry for another 1–2 minutes until the meat is faintly golden and some of the oil is running out of the fat. Splash the Shaoxing wine around the edges of the pan. Add the hard-boiled eggs and stock or hot water, along with the light soy sauce, 1½ tablespoons dark soy sauce and the sugar. Bring to the boil, then cover and simmer for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Pour into a pot or a bowl, allow to cool, then chill overnight. In the morning, remove the layer of pale fat that has settled on the surface. Tip the meat and jellied liquid back into a wok, reheat gently, then boil over a high flame to reduce the sauce, stirring constantly. Remove and discard the ginger, spring onion and whole spices. After 10–15 minutes, when the liquid has reduced by about half, stir in the remaining dark soy sauce.

Shortly before you wish to serve, bring to the boil over a high flame and reduce the sauce to a few centimetres of dark, sleek gravy. Turn out into a serving dish. Then go and welcome your son back from his imperial civil service examinations!

If you have any leftovers – unlikely, in my experience – you can reheat them with a little water and some dried bamboo shoot, winter melon, tofu knots, deep-fried tofu puffs or radishes. In fact, you might wish, like some of my Chinese friends, to red-braise odd scraps of fatty pork just to cook vegetables, because it makes them so delicious.

Shanghai red-braised pork

Omit the eggs and increase the amount of pork to 1kg. Use only 1½ tbsp light soy sauce, 1½ tbsp plus 1 tsp dark soy sauce, 2½ tbsp sugar and 500ml hot water.

What to drink: I'd serve a ripe Aussie grenache with this, maybe even an amarone.

Recipe taken from Land of Fish and Rice, published by Bloomsbury, £26. Photo © Yuki Sugiura