Let us be in no doubt, orbs can provide remarkable pleasure for what is seems a relatively simple serving of meat combined with ovum. However, to make this nibble a success there is skill required in preparation and selection of ingredients. Any old rubbish cooked any old way simply will not do. This is why Marks and Spencer’s orbs are rubbish and Sainsburys’ orbs are shameful lumps of disgust. The orbs Dani has been working on for the past few weeks have pleasured me immensely.

And on that note, I will lean over to the next desk and harass Dani for his recipe: you will need:
500g sausage meat
5 eggs + 1 for adhesive purposes
Breadcrumbs
Flour
Salt and pepper
Several litres of vegetable oil for deep fat frying

The instructions:

Make sure the sausage meat and eggs are all at room temperature.

First boil the eggs. Put the eggs in a pan of cold salted water. Bring to the boil as quickly as possible, then reduce the heat to a simmer. The length of time to boil the eggs depends on the size of the eggs and whether they were at room temperature. For medium eggs I’d suggest simmering them for 4 minutes, for large ones around 5.

Cool the eggs under cold running water for at least 10-15 minutes.

Carefully peel the eggs.

Put the sausage meat in a bowl, add a lot of salt and black pepper and mix together. If the sausage meat is coarse you may want to add a little olive oil to make mixing and shaping it easier.

Sprinkle some flour on a plate and season with a lot of black pepper and salt.

Pour some bread crumbs into a soup plate.

Beat the sixth egg in another soup plate.

To assemble an orb:

Take one fifth of the sausage meat, shape it into a ball and then flatten it to a thin patty of about 13 x 10 cm.

Roll the egg in the flour and spice mixture, coating as much of it as possible.

Shape the sausage meat around the egg. Make sure it covers the entire egg evenly.

Roll the sausage meat covered egg in the beaten egg, then coat it with breadcrumbs. You probably want to pour some bread crumbs on top and roll it around a few times, then press gently to make all the breadcrumbs stick.

Place the orb on a plate, and continue with the remaining ones. If you don’t want to cook the orbs straight away, you can put the plate in the fridge until the time you do.

Frying the orbs:

Heat vegetable oil to 175 degrees. Make sure there is enough oil to fully cover the orbs.

Place two orbs into the deep fat fryer and fry for 6-8 minutes, until they are a beautiful golden brown. You may want to turn the egg over once or twice whilst cooking to ensure a uniform colour.

Repeat with the three remaining eggs.

Many thanks Dani. I can assure you all he has successfully manipulated orbs in this manner on many occasions.

As with all food, quality of ingredients matters. We have experimented with egg suppliers and meat-mongers.

If you must buy eggs from a supermarket the ones to get are undoubtedly Clarence Court Mabel Pearman’s Burford Browns which you can get online from Ocado or in Mr Waitrose’s fine supermarkets. Burford Browns are delicious eggs and, even if they are not as fresh as when my mother had a couple of the fowl in her back garden, it’s great to be able to buy such quality ova from a supermarket and even get them delivered to your home after the slight effort of visiting a website. These eggs work a treat for constructing orbs and you should not be ashamed of using them.

It’s far better if you have quality layers within strolling distance. A stand in the brilliant Hampshire Farmers’ Market sells free-range eggs from Kings Somborne. These eggs won the Radio Solent prize for best tasting eggs (what an odd piece of radio that taste-test must have been) and they are utterly corking. They’re really top quality, taste great and, as I have an eye for a fresh egg, these never disappoint when I crack one for a Full English. You can tell a fresh egg by the degree of association between the white and yolk; the less fresh the egg the more separated and runny the white will be. A good, fresh egg has a thick white in a firm disc around the yolk. These were truly stunning as the basis for orbs and we will endeavor to only source Kings Sombourne eggs until we can find an even better producer – remember, the limits of pleasure are yet to be defined or reached (even with eggs).

Meat is quite naturally a serious consideration when thinking of orbs. We tried sausagemeat from Greenfield Pork Products, Hampshire’s supreme sausage champion, and it just wasn’t quite good enough. It seemed a bit too minced and of slightly slimy texture. It needed an awfully large amount of seasoning to get the best flavour out of it, and even then it just didn’t quite make orbs of maximal quality.

Sausage meat from Beechcroft farm, on the other hand, blew our minds with its class and taste. This is the stuff that goes into their Old English chipolatas you may recall me waxing lyrical about. The evidently superior quality of this meat made for incredibly enjoyable orbs and our guest on the first night we made these commented after noshing through two of them that he never imagined humble orbs could provide so much satisfaction.

The general rule I’d suggest for sausage meat is a relatively high meat content with not too much rusk (although there is no shame in having rusk as it is an important binder). Beechcroft’s sausagemeat is 83% pork which seems about right to me. You also want it to come from an interesting and tasty breed of pig, not some boring Danish swine. Beechcroft have Oxford Sandy and Blacks and these really taste fantastic. It’d worth trying to find some Mangalitsa pig sausagemeat as these taste mind-blowing.

As far as drinks go beer would suit this great pub bar snack. I’d go for a bitter and hoppy golden ale, pale ale or IPA. Those thick, malty, soupy, 5%+ real ales are almost invariably nauseating. Bit of refreshing bitterness would work a treat, and I think some Gueuze would be a great match as well.

Obviously I rather like wine with my food so I would suggest a vigorous and young Burgundy that has plenty of fruit and good acidity to compliment the fatty richness of orbs. We first had them with some Christophe Roumier Chambolle-Musigny and the 2007 was a far better food match than the 2009. Young Nuits or Morey would also be a good match but I wouldn’t go for anything too grand. If you are weird enough not to like Pinot then head to the Loire valley for a Cabernet Franc, they have the bright fruit and acidity. Bernard Baudry’s Chinons are delicious. If you want a white wine I’d suggest a Sancerre, Jean-Laurent ‘Le Homme’ Vacheron’s are best (his reds, also listed on the page I link to here, would also be a treat).

Finally, you’ll need some condiments. Mustard is a must: go for Taylors – the first prepared mustard to be sold on the English market. I also got a rather large amount of pleasure with some freshly prepared aioli (here’s my recipe for aioli). Another stunner I got from Beechcroft Farms’ farm shop, but they also have a stand in Hampshire Farmers’ Markets, is Perfect Pickles Red Hot Tomato Chutney. Being a relatively recent convert to ginger I was stunned by how much I enjoyed this and how well it went with the orbs.

My personal favourite accompaniment to orbs is a pickled onion. Perfect Pickles examples are floridly brilliant and I cannot recommend them highly enough. If you cannot make it to a market in this area drop Perfect Pickles’ boss man Dwayne an email (here) and tell him you want to get your hands on his peerless onions as David Strange says they’re the kangaroo’s knackers.

I hope that provides you with a reasonably good overview of the pleasures orbs can provide. Naturally, if you want more information about orbs, the place to go is Forevereggsploring where Mr Constable will furnish you with all the orb facts you need to know. Do make, eat and enjoy these wholesome snacks; they are a great treat to brighten any day!

Emma and Ken of Tsuru Sushi realised they couldn’t get decent ramen in London – with 3,957 registered ramen shops in Tokyo alone they didn’t think it’d be so difficult to start one up. To perfect their recipes they’ve been running a batch of ramen pop-up events at their sushi establishment before opening a dedicated ramen establishment. Judging by the quality of today’s food they are well on the way to getting things sorted and sussed.

The pop-up ramen events have been very good value. At £12.50 per head (including booking fee) you get a drink and ramen. And, I suspect unless you’ve spent a lot of time in Japan, I really don’t think you can be prepared for the ramen. But before I get onto that I’ll mention our little starters.

As we shuffled in from a fiercely cold London afternoon we were greated with a little bowl of well-salted edamame beans. These are normally pretty dull fare but the Editor and I scoffed through there in double-quick time and were so jollied by them we decided to order five pork gyoza as an additional starter.

These were brilliant little parcels of porky delight. The rice outer was a tad dry but the brilliance of the pork filling was indisputable. At £5.75 for five of these little wonders we felt we had done very well. The other meaty starter, free-range chicken kara-age, looked good on other people’s tables and we thought it worth trying next time if we could draw ourselves away from the brilliant gyoza.

Then came the ramen.

That picture should give you some idea that this was no rectangle of dried horribleness. My first mouthful was frankly astounding. The noodles themselves were rich and eggy, bursting with complex, flavours and possessing a really satisfying texture. Not, NOT Bachelor’s Super Noodles. These were served in the most animal-protein-charged broth I think I have ever tasted. To say it was rich and meaty is to woefully understate what was a profound and moving taste experience it provided. Freaking triple-A, man, freaking triple-A!

There was more than noodles and broth, though. Two thick slices of slow-cooked pig positively exploding with powerful flavours of quality pork. The fat and connective tissue when cooked in the right way for long enough is an absolute delight to eat and these were the pig’s posterior. Super brilliant meat. Eating this impressively sized bowl of concentrated pleasure left me stuffed and happy enough even to deal with the horror of being in London for what was, by that point, only going to be long enough to escape from it.

It was an excellent food experience. As I kept enthusiastically announcing to anyone who’d listen, nothing could have prepared me for coruscating brilliance of a new form of fast food. Everybody at the restaurant looked like they were having a great time and they bloody well should have been. There are a couple more of these ramen pop-ups planned that still have tickets available (see their blog I link to below) and you would be seriously missing out if you did not make efforts to attend. That it is cheap is merely a bonus, what matters is it was pant-pissingly brilliant.

Contact details:
Tsuru Sushi, Broadgate Plaza (off Primrose Street), London EC2M 3AB.
+44 (0)20 7377 1166
Tsuru Ramen Blog.
Tsuru Ramen Twitter feed.

As the name suggests, The Grill is a meat-themed establishment. Readers will know I take meat action extremely seriously and am a regular at Hawksmoor’s great restaurants. Obviously it is difficult to compare one meal with about thirty, but as our meal progressed I found myself thinking more and more that the ingredients and culinary cunning, combined with distinctly more modest prices, would be a powerful draw away from my old favourite haunt. That was one hell of a surprise.

There was one thing that didn’t appeal to me at The Grill, which were the high tables with stools. I know restaurant designers like these to encourage faster meals and a feeling of increased separation between tables, but as one who enthusiastically throws myself into dining experiences (particularly those as good as this) I was glad not to be sitting so high. You wonder why? Well, as I entered the restaurant I walked into a pillar…

The menu is quite delightful. There is enough information about the excellent provenance of the ingredients which feature in a broad range of enticing dishes. There is something for everyone, but a large amount if you like dining on bits of flavoursome, well-treated animal. Don’t we all? The beef in particular is really worth considering. Our first courses showed everything is worth considering, but I’ll get to them momentarily.

I enjoyed reading the wine list, which is focused with food-friendly wines at keen prices. There were some flash things, but it was mainly themed on enjoyable bottles that will enhance your meal and not melt your credit card. We drank a rather spiffy Valpolicella Ripasso and it totally satisfied us.

Soon after ordering some complimentary amuse bouche were served and it is no exaggeration to say they were the best we had tasted since our last visit to the French three-star L’Arnsbourg. OK, there were not twenty of them, but the rillettes of powerfully flavoured chicken infused with richly fatty ham and serious mushrooms made these little constructions totally winning. They came with a lovely pea salad and square of pea jelly which is as funny but far tastier than it sounds.

Given my utter hatred of soup I’m not sure how we came to order one as a starter, albeit named a ‘spiced pumpkin velouté’. The word ‘pumpkin’ also had me fretting about delusional thinking as I usually find the stuff repugnant. Much to my surprise it turned out I was being frighteningly sane and correct as the soup… velouté was impossibly yummy; clearly infused with loads of serious stock, a good dollop of cream and perfectly judged spices. There was more. In the middle of the bowl was a rice-flour dumpling, a gyoza, filled with some of the best chicken I’ve ever eaten with together with skillfully-cooked leek. I wasn’t mad to order this, it was cracking.

Our other starter was some pork rillettes with cider mustard and pickles. Quite how a rillette could be both so meaty and so joyously fatty leaves me confused, but we ate it up with lubricious enthusiasm. I’ve sat here thinking about this for the last five minutes and I cannot think of a single rillette experience that has been as good as this.

We shared an 800g rib-eye steak for our main course which was grass-fed Church View Angus beef from the South-West of England that had been given a decent length of dry aging. Just what I love! The steak had been impeccably grilled then sliced off the bone and served (with the bone) on rosemary and potato bread with slow-cooked plum tomatoes. The steak was delicious, particularly the fattier slices which we ate with uninhibited pleasure and many groans of pleasure. Serving it on a lump of characterful bread was a good idea and the tomatoes were just corking. This was abso-tmesis-lutely meat-tacular and Hawksmoor should worry.

This stunning bit of flesh was served with triple-cooked chips. I told our waitress I’d have to make up new, disgustingly filthy rude words to describe their coruscating brilliance, so here goes: the chips were snickflangingly good and made me feel like I’d just had a good throckmorking over with a really gratifying snifulard. But they were better than that. Editor Daniel cooks extraordinarily good triple-cooked chips but these were so much better I am incredibly nervous about when it is time for him to read this article. What’ll he do to me now I’ve said that?

Then came the single greatest piece of comfort food the world has ever known as one of our desserts: rice pudding crème brulée. If those words don’t immediately slather your face with drool, especially when I’ve said it was a brilliantly rich, sweet creation of limitlessly lovely flavour, you are just too pretentious for this website. This came with a Armagnac and prune compote and some Armagnac ice cream and, whilst I know dessert chefs like to be experimental and feel they’ve created a masterpiece on each plate, they were not really needed as the rice pudding crème brulée was so stonkingly good. There should have been more of it. I wanted more of it. Much more of it. Our other dessert was a good sticky toffee pudding that was just fine, but as we were melting into pools of ecstasy over the other dessert maybe we did not pay this enough attention.

The Montcalm is a lovely hotel and worth visiting on its own merits, but having The Grill as its house restaurant means once you’ve arrived in the hotel there is little reason to head out from it into the melee of London to find your larks. Certainly anyone within range of London should be seriously considering this as a restaurant to visit even if you don’t want need a bed within metres on which to expire with extreme gratification once you’ve finished dining. We could hardly express our pleasure at the end of the meal, you won’t be able to either.

Contact details:
The Grill at the Montcalm, 34-40 Great Cumberland Place, London W1H 7TW
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7958 3216

A good baker is a marvellous resource to have; anyone who has to rely on Greggs, as I once did, can only be painfully aware of the misery of inadequate bread. Reeve sell excellent bread plus a range of cakes and pastries that all but those with the most contrived and baroque of neurotic food perversions would joyfully consume. Not only are they are a delight to eat but also a joy to buy as the gratification in the goods has clearly suffused the staff with pleasure – you cannot buy anything from happier people anywhere.

Their bread would seem a good place to start. They don’t have the broadest range you’ll encounter, but everything is made to extremely high standards and the focus on delivering pleasure is precisely the attitude we want. There is a delightful lack of pretension as well: their baguettes are ‘French sticks’, the focaccia is ‘cheese and onion bread’. The latter is a construction of happy excess, slathered with loads of cheese and powerfully flavoured red onion. The cheese and jalapeno (hot chillies on this one) and cheese and pesto breads are similarly charged with fromage fun.

This is perhaps shifting focus away from the basic breads: it’s hard to do better than them. The crusty rolls (six for the price of four) usually sell out before I can manage a civilised demeanour in the morning and this irks me to no small degree as they are perfectly formed. A crispy crust on the outside with a light, fluffy, flavoursome interior – brilliant filled with cheese, ham and plenty of chopped onion. The oven-bottom cob is another marvel with a perfect crust/interior balance of textures. That French stick is just wonderful stuffed with quality Hampshire sausage. All of this is premium bread, made with skill and attention and they don’t charge the Earth for it. Good bread is even more necessary for a happy life than obscenely fine wine and with Reeve a few minutes away my current happiness will assuredly continue.

Pasties and pastries just do it for me in my lunch-zone. Well, the cheese and bacon puff does it for me all day, but largely for breakfast. The cheese they use is quite as good as on their cheesy breads and grilled to a Maillard-y tastiness. There is a rasher of seriously good bacon under this with some remarkably tasty and rarely wet tomato underneath. The pastry case itself is light and quite scrummily infused with flavours from the cheese and bacon. For a swift brekkie, this is the proverbial Good Thing.

Editor Daniel has been quite taken with the Wiltshire pasties (why not ‘Hampshire pasties’ I am yet to challenge them on) and as someone who regularly threw out Greggs sausage rolls after a single bite their versions get the meat/fat balance in the sausage quite well tuned and, once again, the pastry is a joy. Never dry and powdery, always light, tasty and charged with a good carbohydrate buzz – they chose quality flour for their produce.

Then there is cake.

Cake can provoke weird thoughts in some people. Dani and I are sadly aware of one rancid old bint who refuses to eat any bread, pasta or rice at a meal, only to go out to the nearest cake shop and fill her unfortunate face. Then there are those who will only eat cake if it is laced with vegetables with nary a hint of sugar, lest they should actually enjoy themselves. Both are unhealthy attitudes – there are few foods that should not be enjoyed with unashamed delight. Cake from Reeve is pleasure created with rare skill.

Sadly, none of us are immune to some silliness with food. When I first spotted Reeve were selling Jap Fancies I found the name so absolutely hilarious I couldn’t go into the shop to order any and had to stand outside creased up with laughter whilst Daniel procured these little marvels. They are comprised of a vaguely coffee-flavoured paste compressed between some hazelnutty/meringue type discs which are dusted with a powder which, as the picture shows, is an almost identical colour to Buzzle, one of my favourite teddy bears. They are incredibly sweet, but remarkably easy to eat and even when ingested consecutively have not made me feel queasy. Really lovely cakes and you can read more about them on this bonkers but sadly unmaintained site. If you do visit that page I could add my only memory of Kunzle Showboat cakes is that they made me throw up all over my granddad’s lap.

If insanely sweet is your thing then go for a treacle tart; the depth of treacle in them is gloriously impressive. They’re so sugar-charged I’m sure Reeve receives many sanctimonious letters from control-freak middle-class Guardian readers demanding that less fortunate people be banned from buying such things in case they enjoy them too much. I’ll admit that eating less than half of one made my teeth ache, but I loved it all the same. Reeve do a family size one as well – caries-tastic!

Just like with the cheesy breads, the spirit of happy excess also impregnates most of Reeve’s cakes. Look at how much sugar dusts that Chelsea bun! My virginal Reeve cake experience was a Belgian bun, which seduced me with its frankly rude amount of icing. The lemon tarts also have enough icing to keep several wedding cake manufacturers’ stock-rooms heaving and their thick and rich lemony flavour is the business.

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If Reeve ever stop making cakes I’m sure the resulting crash in sugar exports would render several Caribbean islands destitute. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?

On the coldest day of the year so far Daniel and I went out for a country walk, in central Winchester, stopping via Reeve. The Eccles cake you see me enjoying is easily the best I’ve ever had. Reeve’s currants are impossibly plump and juicy, entirely unlike dried mouse poo. The syrupy goop they are preserved in, soaks into the base of the cake infusing it with hedonism, and the whole texture of the pastry and filling is utterly desirable. It was brilliant, I tell you. I’ll have another one tomorrow. Daniel had one of their Stollen slices and was tickled rosy-cheeked by its decadent butter and rum character. The preserved fruit in this was staggeringly good and if it was still Christmas I’d have one of those tomorrow as well.

The staff radiate the same brilliance and limitless joy that suffuse all their glorious goodies. You could not find a jollier bunch of people unless you managed to substitute all the cabbage in a primary school canteen with raspberry jam without anyone but the children noticing.

Ever since I made a passing reference to ‘cake taxonomy’ on our first visit, the delightful Hayley treats us to such broad, winning smiles on every visit that any passing cosmetic dentists must feel woefully inadequate. She’s lovely, and making people smile is a noble thing to do; it’s only required moderate silliness on my part so far.

Angie, pictured here modelling our afternoon’s supply of Jap Fancies, doesn’t think I’m silly enough. I’ve been rebuked (with a big grin on her face) for complaining about the weather; the standard, miserable English conversation topic is not fun enough for wonderful Angie. A couple of weeks ago I walked in and she leapt out at me saying, “You’re not allowed in! You’re spending all your pennies and getting fat!” again wearing a big smile. We whined until she relented and let us buy more cakes.

All the staff exude happiness, which has little to do with my generalised comedy value. They are simply happy people who enjoy their job, which is making people happy. What a great job to have!

I’m sure I don’t need to add that I’ve never seen a miserable face in Reeve. Tom was somewhere between chuffed as punch and vastly offended to be called “Baby boy” by a customer – everyone in the shop laughed. I’m aware enough of my paranoia to know that they don’t really have gin and tonic vaporisers all around the shop to keep everyone who enters and works there charged with mirth, but the idea has occasionally seemed compelling.

Not long ago I repeated the phrase that “The first bite is with the eye” and I must admit that the first time I walked by Reeve I thought it looked like an undistinguished clone baker. Looks can be deceiving. I could not be happier in any shop, not even in a wine-merchant with the world’s most comprehensive Burgundy section with unlimited credit lines to tall people with glasses. Anyway, Berry’s stopped doing that years ago. Reeve has supremely high quality bread, cakes and baked goods sold by people I want to cuddle whilst mixing improving cocktails for. They are champion.

Here’s their website.

There is no reason why all meals should not be cooked with quality ingredients. The Westgate, proudly displaying the Hampshire Fare logo on its menus, realise this and are also aware that joyful excess is a great way of pleasuring people. The Full English may be debased in a lot of establishments (see Capt. Peter’s article), at the Westgate it is a shining star of delight.

The Full English is a great place to start. You want to order it large and with black pudding. Have a glass of their sweetly delicious orange juice whilst it is being prepared then leap into a massive plateful of joy. Everything about it is spot on. The sausages are flavoursome and meaty, really high quality. One of the most brilliant things I’ve heard over breakfast was a chap at the next table asking if he could swap his grilled tomatoes for an extra sausage (cool move but the tomatoes are great too). The bacon also is well up there, and these are all sourced from the best butchers in the area. The black pudding is so good that I’m almost tempted to swap bacon for another slice of it in future – hell’s bells, I love bacon! That’s some black pudding! But everything in the Full English is at the screaming end of brilliance and you’d do well to order this.

You’d do well to order almost anything else as well. Editor Daniel is partial to the Welsh Rarebit, which he comments is happily themed on ‘Welsh’ with less emphasis on ‘bit’. I take this to mean the staggering quantity of lewdly good melted cheese (with mustard and beer mixed in) on top is a celebration of all that is enjoyable in life. There certainly is one hell of a lot of cheese on it. Good! Do as he correctly does and order yours with extra bacon (bums, it’s good bacon) and fried eggs.

Every other dish we’ve seen going to other tables looks irresistible. I saw someone having the eggs benedict for the first time today and instantly drooled all down my front. Bloody hell, even with the toast and jam the jam is home made and your toast is made from a variety of flavours of bread. Maybe the granola might make you less completely chuffed with life, but I’d wager even that has the potential to pleasure.

When you wake up feeling rested and happy, which I do these days, what more could you ask for than someone giving you an obscenely good meal and serving it with a smile? At every trip to the Westgate I feel I’ve got more and leave so happy I can feel fun police from hundreds of miles around fuming with sanctimonious irritation. Sod those who think enjoyment is something to feel guilty about, get to the Westgate and have a really brilliant time.

Contact Details:
The Westgate Hotel, 2 Romsey Road, Winchester SO23 8TP
01962 820222

What a brilliant start to the new year! We hope you have a great new year too!