When things go wrong

When I started this blog, one of my aims was to encourage more people to cook from scratch. Obviously we can’t all be Michel Roux, Raymond Blanc or a domestic god(dess) and things do go wrong. We all have culinary disasters or near misses. I think the important thing to realise is that if we could all cook perfect dishes at the first attempt then life would be too easy. There would be no sense of achievement at mastering a tricky dish or even putting a plate of edible food on the table.

Recently I have cooked two dishes which have been too acidic. One was a dish I have made countless times before without a problem and the other was from recognised recipes, even though I adapted the version I made. In neither case did I add or subtract ingredients which would have affected the acidity of the dish.

In the case of the ragu I corrected the acidity by adding sugar. The other dish was the beef stew, and I did not really want to add sugar. After some research on the Internet, the suggested solution was to add a small amount of baking soda ( sodium bicarbonate). This caused the stew to foam like a fermenting bed of lava. Once this initial reaction had occurred I was able to taste, then add a little more bicarb until I was happy with the result. I think it would be important to add a small amount at a time otherwise it could become too salty. Remember the old adage, you can add but you can’t take away.