Tag: chilli

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A taste of Peru

Temple Quay Market

So how often do you get a chance to sample some authentic looking and tasting Peruvian food?

One of my favourite features of Bristol is the weekly street food market that takes place every Thursday at the square in the newly redeveloped Temple Quay. It is open between 12 and 2, but I suggest you get there early, as there are large queues and many times dishes sell out (especially the vegetarian ones).

There are a range of regular and guest stalls, and when I went there was a real choice. I did like the idea of Greek, the halloumi pitta sounded and looked delicious. There was also a pulled lamb sub, that also looked very nice. After looking around, I went with Uchu Perú, as stall selling Peruvian food, my choice dictated slightly by the shortness of the queue and the interesting sounding menu.

Uchu Perú Menu

In the end looking over the menu I decided that I would go with the sample menu, so I could have a bit of everything. The sample plate has smaller portions of all the dishes from the menu.

If you stay at the market the stall provides a nice plate, but as it was starting to rain I got my meal to go and they split it between two boxes for me to take away.

Ceviche, which was sea bass cooked in lime with prawns, chilli, coriander, red onion, sweet potato and Peruvian corn. This was fresh and sharp and really tasty. I wasn’t so enamoured with the Peruvian corn, but it was something that I can see other people liking.

The Quinoa Salad was made from black and white quinoa with carrot, radish, coriander, broad beans, feta cheese and Peruvian yellow chilli sauce. I really liked how the team put this together, and was like the Ceviche was delicious. The ingredients were fresh, tasty and worked really well together.

The final dish in my trio was Causa, which was freshly piped potato puree with Peruvian yellow chilli paste, served cold with tomato, avocado puree, purple corn mayonnaise, sweet potato crisp, pulled chicken, topped with togaroshi mayonnaise. As I was eating I did wonder what the pink stuff was, but re-reading the menu, I realised this was the purple corn mayonnaise. Delicious components that worked really well together.

I really liked how the dishes were constructed to order and they looked beautiful. I’ve not eaten Peruvian dishes before, these were delicious and I would certainly go back to Uchu Perú.

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Crispy Chilli Squid

Over the last few years I have written various reviews of crispy squid from various restaurants. I find that how places cook and treat squid gives a comparative indication of the quality of the cooking.

I do cook squid myself, but most of the time I either stir fry or griddle the squid. This time though I decided to cook crispy chilli squid.

I took the squid and cut it up into what I can only describe as one inch squares and included the tentacles. These were then tossed in seasoned flour. The flour had black pepper and dried chilli flakes added. This is then left for about thirty minutes. The combination of flour and the wet squid results in a kind of tempura batter, without needing to add anything else to the flour.

Crispy Chilli Squid in flour

The squid was then quickly deep fried in hot oil. The squid was drained on kitchen paper.

Crispy Chilli Squid

It was served with a sweet chilli dip. For added heat add some freshly sliced red chilli to garnish.

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Spicy Salami Sticks

SnackProbably the best way to describe these is as posh Pepparami. Though they are very much better and taste nicer than the over processed salty snack that is Pepparami.

They are thin salami sticks with chilli. They are chewy and slightly spicy. The chilli is subtle and certainly doesn’t overpower them.

I enjoyed them as a snack, but not sure if I would buy them again.

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Tough

For lunch today I popped into Debenhams in Bristol which I know is never the best place to go and eat (especially as there are more choices now with Cabot’s Circus open) however they do nice children’s lunch boxes which the children like.

I decided to try the Chicken Kebab on Flat Bread with Sweet Chilli sauce, which came in at £4.75

Well it was cooked fresh to order (so the sign said) and was one of the reason I chose it, rather than go for something which had been standing under the hot lamp for a while.

After about eight minutes it was ready (they use those buzzer things) and off I popped to pick it up.

Let’s just say it was nothing to shout home about, something I wouldn’t recommend to anyone and I would never buy it again.

The chicken was just plain tough, and was merely cooked chicken re-heated, hardly freshly cooked to order! It’s surprising how tough twice cooked chicken can be. Also not very much of it, just a single skewer. Why do places like Debenhams which for example were cooking gammon from fresh can’t do the same with the chicken? The flat bread was like a naan, but tough, almost stale in places. The sweet chilli sauce was way too sweet and didn’t really have any kick.

Overall I was very disappointed, I was expecting it to be much better than it was, my local kebab shop could do much better.

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Hot Stuff

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in his weekly Guardian column plays with hot stuff and does stuff with chillies.

There’s a lot more to chillies than how hot they are – the range and complexity of flavour from pepper to pepper really has to be tried to be believed.

Great article which shows that there is more to chillies then the mouth burning Friday night curry or the green ones available at the supermarket.

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What a load of crepe!

One of the issues I have with a lot of department store restaurants (and visitor attraction restaurants) is that they cook the food in advance and then keep it warm for hours on end… Now that is possible with some dishes, but with others it just means dried out food.

One of the dishes that you can get at my local John Lewis is freshly cooked to order crepes. They make them as and when needed, rather than make them at 9am in the morning and keep them warm till 6pm in the evening!

We had crepes the last time we were there, one with chilli beef and one with mushroom stroganoff; both were served with salad.

The beef chilli was well cooked and nice and spicy. A little too hot for my tastes, but not excessively so.

Crepes

The mushroom stroganoff was really nice and went well with the crepes.

Crepe

The salad though was disappointing, I have had much better salads before at John Lewis, this was in the main lettuce with a tiny bit of red onion and pepper.

Overall for a department store restaurant they were really nice and probably one of the better items available. The fact you can buy wine and beer to go with the crepes makes the place even more attractive as a place to go out and get a quick bite to eat whilst shopping.