Food news

• Welcome to May’s Observer Food Monthly

  21-05-2017 13:00 via theguardian.com
  
  This month, we head to Italy to learn about Massimo Bottura’s Food for Soul project, and to Lebanon to witness how a restaurant is bridging sectarian divides, while classic recipes are supplied by Jane GrigsonWe get around. This month we have a packed edition for you with stories from Yorkshire, Milan, Chichester and Beirut. Jay Rayner has been up and down the country meeting some of the non-UK farm workers whose lives could be changed forever by the horror that is Britain’s departur
  
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• Uber for wine: and all without grapes

  21-05-2017 13:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Ava Winery wants to re-create drinks in the lab, including some chemically identical to expensive old wines. Will it work?The most fascinating wine project I’ve come across this year has no need for vineyards, barrels, or,a winery. It doesn’t even use grapes. If you believe what the people behind the project say, they could be on the brink of challenging everything that people hold dear about wine.Though they don’t quite put it this way, Ava Winery could be as disruptive in its
  
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• Taste test: champagne and sparkling wines

  21-05-2017 13:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Vintage, rosé, prosecco, cava and English – Bubbledogs’ sommelier and co-founder Sandia Chang tastes and rates high-street fizzes Continue reading...
  
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• Sir Peter Blake: ‘All a country has is its culture; the rest is infrastructure’

  21-05-2017 13:00 via theguardian.com
  
  On the eve of Sgt Pepper’s half-century, the pop artist shares stories of his classic album sleeve, snubbing Warhol and why he hasn’t paid a bill in Mr Chow for 50 yearsI meet Sir Peter Blake in Mr Chow, the institution of a Chinese restaurant opposite One Hyde Park, where flats sell for £75m. Blake knew the restaurant’s eponymous owner in leaner times. He first met Michael Chow, he explains as we sit down, when the restaurateur was living on a camp bed in the garage of t
  
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• Massimo Bottura and his global movement to feed the hungry

  21-05-2017 12:00 via theguardian.com
  
  The Italian is one of the finest chefs in the world. But his greatest achievement is Food for Soul, his project to feed the poor and cut food waste, now about to open in LondonMassimo Bottura is running late. You imagine this is probably a perennial condition. In the previous week, as I know from various emails, the man who was in 2016 voted the number one chef in the world, has been in Tokyo, Melbourne and London, returning between each trip to cook at Osteria Francescana, his three Michelin-st
  
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• ‘The kitchen has no religion’: the Lebanese activist offering hope through food

  21-05-2017 11:00 via theguardian.com
  
  With a farmers’ market, and a string of restaurants and B&Bs, Kamal Mouzawak is helping Lebanese women and Syrian refugees to transform their livesKamal Mouzawak grew up in Jeita, a small town in the mountains north of Beirut, during the Lebanese civil war. One of his earliest memories was when his mother was out of the kitchen and he decided to make a cake. He thought to himself: ‘What is a cake?’ He stirred a slurry of flour, sugar and eggs in an empty sardine tin because
  
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• OFM’s classic cookbooks: Jane Grigson’s Good Things

  21-05-2017 10:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Lindsey Bareham recalls one of Jane Grigson’s finest works, a 1971 collection of early columns for the Observer colour magazine. Plus six of our favourite recipes from the bookWhen Good Things was first published in 1971, I was consumer editor of Time Out in a very run-down King’s Cross. We lived on a pittance but I was learning to cook, often inspired by Jane Grigson’s column in the Observer colour magazine. One of my first successes was the curious sounding curried parsnip so
  
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• Ed Balls: my boozy lunches with Eddie George – and the famous Granita dinner

  21-05-2017 09:59 via theguardian.com
  
  The ex-chancellor recalls the Strictly tour, the ‘lasagne plot’ and what Nikolas Sarkozy thought of American foodWhen I was five, Dad did a job-swap and taught biology at Eton, so for a term I attended a nearby primary school and, each lunchtime, had to march to a building where a very strict woman would blow a very loud whistle if anyone spoke a word while eating. All my memories of that term are of awful, very frightening meals.Dad took a post at the University of East Anglia and w
  
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• Len & Alex Deighton’s Italian Cookstrips: Erbazzone

  21-05-2017 09:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Len Deighton: Erbazzone – a delicious “cucina povera” dish found throughout Emilia Romagna. Greens, cheese and pastry originally cooked in a cooling bread oven.Alex Deighton: A purist might say we’ve used too much pastry. Len Deighton is the author of the Action Cookbook and French Cooking for Men (HarperCollins) Continue reading...
  
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• Brexit and the coming food crisis: ‘If you can’t feed a country, you haven’t got a country’

  21-05-2017 09:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Britain’s food production depends on seasonal migrant labour from the EU. What will happen to those workers after Brexit? And how will it change the industry?On 24 June last year, the few hundred residents of a temporary village, hidden from view in the middle of a West Sussex soft fruit farm, received letters. They were signed by David Kay, the managing director of the Hall Hunter Partnership, a business that grows 10% of the UK’s strawberries, 19% of its raspberries and a whacking
  
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• The best organic, biodynamic and natural wines | David Williams

  21-05-2017 07:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Last week’s Real Wine Fair in London was a wonderful showcase for wines made without chemicals. Here are three of the bestSato Wines Riesling, Central Otago, New Zealand 2014 (from £23.99, AG Wines; Les Caves) The Real Wine Fair, a show devoted to organic, biodynamic and natural wines from hundreds of producers all over the world, has become a bit of a springtime fixture in the UK wine world calendar, a kind of east London foodie hipster version of the Chelsea Flower Show. As ever, I
  
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• Plot, London: restaurant review | Jay Rayner

  21-05-2017 07:00 via theguardian.com
  
  As the gentrification wave reaches Tooting in south London, a new diner makes itself at home in the local marketPlot, Unit 70-72, Broadway Market, Tooting High Street, London SW17 0RL (020 8767 2639). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80It would be a mistake to write about Plot, a sliver of a restaurant serving terrible cocktails and great food in one of south London’s traditional covered markets, without first rehearsing the arguments around gentrification. It demands tha
  
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• Of good motherhood and arsenic | Victoria Coren Mitchell

  21-05-2017 01:05 via theguardian.com
  
  Bringing up children is hard enough, without having to worry about chemicals found in baby foodOver the last fortnight, newspapers have given us the following information about feeding small children:1) A plant-based diet, wrongly administered, can ruin their health. Continue reading...
  
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