A bread mother which i started a couple of days ago on the Nordic Food Lab boat. I stoneground red wheat, buckwheat and rye grain in this great wooden mill, and when i next checked it, it had formed a bright purple skin, and smelled of tangy and sweet mushrooms

A Hissing Cockroach, kindly donated by Copenhagen Zoo, blanched and fried with butter, onions and thyme by Ben Reade at Nordic Food Lab. The flesh (if we can call it that) is somewhat similar in texture to overcooked brown crab meat, and the taste is slightly sweet, although obfuscated rather by the onions. As far as breakfasts go, it is unequalled in adventurousness. 

Check out the video, edited by Anna Caballero

Breakfast at Nordic Food Lab. Porridge with birch syrup and cream infused with beeswax

Day 2 at the Nordic Food Lab and we are eating our fears, including this lovely big locust.

A Danish honeycomb and in the second picture, pollen fermented by the bees that lived inside it. Very hard to procure (given to the Nordic Food Lab by a beekeeper) and without much known about it, it is one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten. It has a complex taste which, as you eat it, transforms from sweetness to bitterness to the sour tang of lactic fermentation, and it’s texture is somehow sticky, moist, powdery and dry all at the same time, with a pleasant resistance. Totally compelling

Beef Jerky
My first attempt. A spice mix of dried hogweed seeds, hawthorns, lime (tree) leaves and roasted hay, all toasted and ground, along with an Indonesian long peppercorn. Next, a piece of 50+ day aged Dexter sirloin from Nathan Mill’s brand new shop The ButcherySE23. The beef that Nathan sources and ages is better than any other beef I have ever eaten, and it actually smelled like it was cooked already - deeply savoury and with the aroma of lactic bacteria.
I nearly scrapped the test in favour of eating it straight away. I am curing the slices with the spice mixture, salt and sugar for 24 hours, then I’ll dehydrate them at 60C

A beer bread made with malted wholegrain, many-seeded flour and Kernel IPA levain, proved three times

Beer sourdough bread. The levain was made with the yeast in a bottle of Citra IPA from the Kernel Brewery, some of the beer, and organic white bread flour from Wessex Mill. First test. Next up, working out how much of the water in the recipe to replace with straight beer. My dough slashing technique sucks

Hay gastrique, made in September. It’s extremely powerful and a bit nutty. To be used to make shrubs

'Backslopping' new yoghurt. Or rather, making a new batch of live yoghurt, using the leftover stained greek yoghurt from whey-gathering (see previous post) topped up with full fat milk and left out

Mise for new turnip ferment. Shredded raw turnips with 1.5% salt. Turnip juice and Greek yoghurt whey

Designs for a red course, comprising beetroots, beef, roses, and creme fraiche, to be served as part of a dinner progressing through individual colours

Soup made with smoked and roasted gilthead bream heads, coconut milk, lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves, fresh turmeric root. In the bowl are shredded turnips, fermented in yoghurt whey for ten weeks, spring onions and a charred lemongrass leaf

French partridges, dry-aged for 28 days at 2 degrees celsius. In hindsight, longer than i would leave them in the future, but effective as a test of the effect of ageing on game/white meat. The crowns were aged intact, and then after being seared and roasted the breasts and legs were carved off. The meat was a little dry, but the taste was incredibly intense, as if it contained all the taste of ten birds. Next season, I will probably age them for between 2 and 3 weeks, and will try it with far superior English (grey) partridges

Midnight snack-eating up leftover mise. Scallops fried in hay butter, quick-pickled cukes

Roasted mallard backs, dried hawthorn, dried borage, grilled chestnut wood and bay in pressure cooker

Sloes in the pressure cooker

An experimental butter. Crème fraîche and double cream from Helsett Farm in Cornwall, mixed in equal parts and left to ripen at room temperature for 2 days. I added about 90 grams of clear live yoghurt whey, mixed it gently, and will leave it another day to see what happens. I hope the whey will act as a lactic starter, and together with the other live cultures that colonise the creams will give an acidic edge to the butter. Whether or not the mixture will eventually whip and split into butter and buttermilk, I don’t know.

If so, the butter will be the first butter served during our residency at House of Wolf starting November 6th (blanchandshock.com) and the buttermilk will be an ingredient in the bread we are testing this week.

Dried hogweed seeds and stems, gathered in Gloucestershire. They smell a little like coriander seeds, kind of sweet and citrussy

Live prawns from Salcombe @moxonsfish this morning