Playing the game of three

2 days ago

"I can’t find plain flour for love nor money, so I have been baking apples with marmalade and the dregs of the sherry bottle instead" Nigel Slater

Nigel was talking about this lockdown dish of Baked apples with sherry and marmalade to which I shall return. At first glance - three ingredients - but ...

I know I have written about the 3-ingredient thing before, but this time I'm taking a slightly different approach. Well I hope I am.

This post began with me trying to reduce the number of items in my email inbox. I usually manage to keep it to a dozen or so items, but of late it has grown a bit because I have kept a few newsletters which I thought I would refer to again. As indeed I now am. I started with the oldest - a Guardian Feast newsletter edited by Rachel Roddy which The Guardian called Threesy-peasy! and to which she gave the title What I learned from my three ingredient challenge.

As you know I get bored on a regular basis - in all sorts of ways - so the notion of a three ingredient challenge was enticing. Could this be yet another game I could play with the day to day routine of cooking dinner? This is the first question I'm asking - a simple one - and I think the answer is yes. Maybe one every fortnight. And it is a real challenge - especially if you stick to the concept of literally three ingredients.

And when I think about it I can't remember anyone writing a book, or even an article on cooking with just two ingredients. Three seems to be the minimum. Beans on toast perhaps. No - if you have put butter on your toast you have three, and besides the beans themselves have a whole host of other ingredients in the tin. As Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says, they are "something that already contains other ingredients within it." So not really two ingredients is it? Define ingredient I suppose.

Does ingredient mean just one item - a fruit, a vegetable, a meat, a fish ... ? Or does it include things that come in bottles, or cans or packets, that include other things - sauces, pickles, condiments ... of any kind? Even things like cakes or biscuits, which are of course made up of several ingredients. Is bread a one ingredient thing? Is butter? Salted butter anyway.

Which brings me to the second question - can you really cook a satisfying meal with just three ingredients?

Again - define meal. Because if you start wading through all those sites that propose three ingredient dishes, you will find that the majority of those recipes are for side-dishes, and desserts - not for dinner, maybe part of dinner but not the whole thing. Not for something that would provide you with a meal that provided most of the things you require to be satisfied and healthy. I won't say it would need to provide everything you need to be healthy because that would be really difficult - although I have to say beans on toast might be close.

Which brings me to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. To assist in my 'research' for this post I turned to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's book Easy which was based on a television series called, I think, Three Good Things on a Plate. This is the frontispiece of my book, opposite his Introduction that includes these words:

"Even with more elaborate dishes, there are so often three primary ingredients holding the fort."

'Primary' take note. It's a word that hides a multitude of obfuscation, because flicking through his book - which I love by the way - it has lots of lovely things in it - but flicking through it I noticed that the vast majority of the recipes include many more than three ingredients. Sometimes those supporting players are actually 'primary' ingredients as well.

Take the bacon, beans and tomato in the picture above. In the book he has two recipes that list those three ingredients, and one other which replaces the bacon with olive oil - although olive oil features in the other two. Indeed olive oil - well any kind of cooking fat - is very often ignored - specifically - in many recipe writers' meals constructed from three ingredients. So what did Hugh do with those three ingredients shown in the picture?

Number 1 - a salad - in which the tomatoes are cherry tomatoes and the ham is some kind of thinly sliced air-dried ham such as Parma ham, and a tin of cannellini beans. Your three ingredients, but then there's some thyme and a salad dressing - oil, vinegar, garlic, mustard, salt and pepper. Do those extras count? And let me say I'm paying particular attention to this, because I'm quite attracted to the notion of trying the three ingredient challenge, and am wondering what my rules might be. Is it alright, to include - say - a cooking fat, salt and pepper? Are garlic and herbs a step too far? Does salad dressing count as one ingredient? After all you can buy it in a jar. Not that I would.

Number 2 - "essentially a homemade version of baked beans, though the beans are simmered not baked." says Hugh.

First of all you fry the chopped bacon in olive oil then you add the beans and toss around for a bit. Then there's the rest - the tomato being in the form of tomato passata or purée, plus bay leaves, garlic, apple juice, mustard, cider vinegar, salt and pepper. That's quite a few extras and he finishes by saying:

"They are good on toast, but also lovely with a hunk of bread or mashed potatoes and a robust green salad."

I'm sure they are - but 'with' is the operative word here. Although now that I think about it you could just add more liquid and turn them into soup.

Number 3 - Indeed number three is soup - the beans, tomatoes, olive oil recipe. No ham, and the olive oil is considered to be an actual ingredient here, although there is also a bay leaf and a sprig of thyme. So this is indeed pretty simple. Maybe the olive oil is considered to be a main ingredient because of the finished soup being drizzled with it. But you could add some ham and it would still fit within his recipe restrictions going on what else is in the book.

None of the above are, however a main meal in my eyes - maybe the soup, but you would serve it with some kind of carbohydrate would you not?

So I perused his meat section and found this Bacon, radichio, shallots which really only had a bay leaf, olive oil and salt and pepper as extras. I'd be tempted to have some potatoes as well - or maybe bread would do; and he does suggest pouring over some cream and flashing it under a hot grill.

I think it shows the difficulty of really cutting back to just three plain ingredients - not things in jars, cans and bottles, and he implies that it is indeed almost impossible:

"of course, there's a bit more than that to these satisfying dishes. They are not only three things on a plate - there are seasonings, perhaps oil or vinegar, some spices, maybe a starchy carbohydrate on the side or an egg to finish things off." Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

So I looked again elsewhere and found that it is possible - although not easy. Rachel Roddy, who started me off on all of this had a few suggestions in her Guardian Feast newsletter, one of which was:

"A tin of chickpeas is, of course, two ingredients away from a meal: just warm them with olive oil and garlic, add three cans of water, bring to the boil, add pasta and cook until dense. Cheese and red chilli on top takes you from three to five, I know, but is worth it." Rachel Roddy

And she has a recipe for it elsewhere, on her own website, where I found that this dish is called Pasta e ceci and which she claims she and her small family eat at least once a week.

Her version is rather soupy looking, but when I went looking for Pasta e ceci I found that it can be any thickness that you prefer, and that of course you can use any kind of pasta, although macaroni did seem to be a fairly common one - as in the Pasta e ceci from Katie Leaird on the Serious Eats website - shown here from two different angles and looking somewhat different. It's also very similar to another Italian dish Chickpeas cacio e pepe, a version of which was in the OTK (Ottolenghi Test Kitchen) book Shelf Love.

Elsewhere Noor Murad, who headed up the Test Kitchen at the time, says of this dish:

"You cook chickpeas in water, then add parmesan and butter, and it emulsifies the sauce. If you’re allowed a fourth ingredient, lots of black pepper. It’s so rich and delicious."

No pasta this time and obviously by the time it got to the book they decided to also add some spinach and some pickled chillies, but as Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall says:

"One of the lovely things about your food combos being very simple is that they are then also very flexible."

Supremely simple can be very simple, although not always that easy, as Dale Berning Sawa says in her Guardian list of 50 most simple, delicious 3-ingredient recipes:

Most easy recipes are not easy. Achieving simplicity is never actually that simple, but in the kitchen it is usually. Crucially, all [the recipes] use only three things other than oil, butter, salt, pepper and water. As simple as ready, steady … cook!"

Take for example Gordon Ramsay's Broccoli soup which seems to be universally admired and which I found elsewhere. It begins fairly easily with cooking the broccoli - florets only - in water, but then you are instructed to:

"Blend the florets in a food processor, adding a ladleful of the reserved cooking water at a time, stopping now and then to scrape down the sides. Continue until you have a really silky, smooth, startlingly bright-green puree the texture of soft, runny butter with a glossy sheen and without even the tiniest lump."

And then sieved with more of the cooking water and reheated. Finish with cream - or olive oil I saw in another version. Just broccoli and water though really. That's two ingredients. Is water an ingredient?

Pasta is of course, one of the easiest things to tizzy up with only a couple more ingredients, and perhaps there is nothing better then Fettucine with butter and parmesan, as proposed by Rachel Roddy here. Add some truffles, or chilli , lemon juice or pepper and you have a whole list of alternatives. Or just add pesto - although I guess pesto falls into one of those ingredients that is a mix of a whole lot of other ingredients. In fact last night I made a kind of lasagne with some leftover omelette/frittata which included a whole lot of other things. That's two. But then there were also tomatoes, ham, cheese, cream and frozen spinach - so nowhere near just three ingredients, even if you cheat a bit. In fact that's my major problem when it comes to cooking. I keep adding extra things, so cooking with just three will indeed be a challenge.

Returning to that list of 50 things it illustrated both ends of the spectrum - ultra simple to a bit of a cheat. On the bit of a cheat side I give you two examples. The first is from Anna Jones - Chickpea and carrot crêpe, which in itself is simple, but is then shown with a fairly complicated topping - with suggestions for others. The second is from Ottolenghi - Yoghurt rice with channa dal and curry leaf oil. It's included because of the yoghurt rice, but that is really just the base of a whole other meal.

The other end of the spectrum is all about puff pastry, which I imagine we all have waiting for an experiment in our freezers. The list showed a Puff pastry pizza, but the last word might go to Rachel Roddy who started all of this off, with her recommendation of:

"a pack of puff pastry rolled into a rectangle, spread with cheese and halved cherry tomatoes, or a mush of cooked-down onion and anchovies – a quick pissaladière in hardly 20 words, to go with a slow glass of wine."

Does the wine count I wonder?

I do like the idea of another regular kitchen challenge however. And I have decided to compromise and not count, cooking fats, salt and pepper and herbs. I'm still not sure whether spices count - maybe a spice mix but not a whole lot of individual spices - which is rather splitting hairs is it not? I think other condiments and things like vinegar count however. But just so that every now and then you can get a bit more flavour I'll include things out of a jar, can or bottle. Well that last probably depends on how defiant I am feeling.

I almost forgot Nigel and his apples in lockdown when he had to cope with a half empty pantry. I don't think he was aiming for three ingredients, and indeed there are five - apples, sherry marmalade, lemon juice and sugar. But he was lazy and didn't even core the apples. Not really a three ingredient challenge. More of a what have I got challenge. It almost makes the cut though.

T - Below are table and twist - but T is relatively easy I suppose - there were also tennis court, trampoline, twigs, tyres, tunnel, trailer, trees and tree trunk.