Recently I have been eating the best sausages I have ever encountered, from Hyden Organics. I was very pleased to score some of the sausage meat and some of their eggs so Dani could create cracking Hyden Organics Scotch eggs. They were topping.

When we noshed on these orbs we had a simply spiffing bottle of Morey villages. It was a 2007, a vintage some people are sniffy about, but the qualities of the wine showed pulsingly pleasurably in this year. Suited the skeggs quite wonderfully.

The sausages I have been eating have been Hyden Organics pork and wild garlic flavour. The pork is from Oxford Sandy and Black pigs, which by now I am convinced make flesh of the tastiest order. As I wrote in my first piece about them, Hyden Organics are organic meat producers and I am sure their sympathetic treatment results in superior flavour.

When at the last Hampshire Farmers’ Market we saw Hyden were offering some of the sausage meat unskinned – our minds immediately turned to orb creation. When mentioning this to Hyden’s boss man he insisted we try some of his Bantam eggs for the core of the skeggs.

As you may know Bantams are a small breed of chicken and so the eggs are smaller than usual. Dani is modelling one (along with a normal hen’s egg, on the right and left of the picture respectively). I grew up with Bantams in my back garden (named, after their primary characteristics, by my dear sister as Blacky, Whitey and Runny) and knew their eggs were tasty. I thought they’d make superior sausage spheres.

The recipe was as given before, but once the eggs were boiling in the pan they were taken off the heat for three minutes before cooling the eggs in copious volumes of cold water. This was a guess; see below how accurate it was to get molten yolks…

The eggs required extremely exacting shell skinning skill. Breaking the shell without shattering the whole egg and yolk was difficult. Well done Editor Dani for doing it with furious concentration and no swearing.

Hyden Organics pork and wild garlic sausage meat is a bit damper than other meat Dani has made orbs from, but he managed to wrap the Bantam eggs and breadcrumb them again with perfect precision with a paucity of profanity.

Once wrapped in meat and crumbed they were deep-fried for three minutes then transferred to an oven at 160°C for a further three minutes. They were then ready!

Were the yolks liquid? See below:

The sausage meat tasted fantastic; really porky with a good garlic character. Premier pig! I really loved the taste of the Bantam eggs, but the yolks do have a slightly thicker texture than normal chicken eggs that Dani was a touch perturbed by. I thought that was just fine as the flavour was so good.

Hyden Organics clearly remain top flight producers of animal products, and with their produce Dani reached, what is up until this point, his zenith of Scotch egg production. They were wizard weasel!

I’ll give you a note of the wine we drank with the orbs.

Morey-Saint-Denis ‘Clos Solon’ 2007, Domaine Fourrier

A rapturously pleasurable nose that was blooming with the great fruit of the vintage and suffused with the enchanting scented earthiness of Morey. It smelled highly attractively and for a village wine had quite a lot of complexity. Oak and alcohol were not excessive and the whole impression of the nose was one of sybaritic gratification. Morey could well be the best village in the Cote de Nuits, and this sniffed up like it could defend that reputation. The palate was almost as lustfully enjoyable but it seemed like it kept its grey nylon socks on whilst it was trying to get down to it – it was a touch less committed to lustful pleasure. This was mainly due to a slightly high acid level that seemed just a hint out of balance. The tannins were structured but seductive and the fruit gorgeous. Very long, but if I’m really, rudely picky the palate might have been lacking the highest levels of complexity one could want from a village wine, as well as its balance not decking a Hare Krishna with the first blow. But that’s me being a really critical sod; it was a really pleasurable wine and well-worth seeking out. Drink over the next couple of years.

Here’s Hyden Organic’s website

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The cookbook Hawksmoor at Home is probably the only collection of cooking instructions you need. It provided this recipe for a toasted cheese sandwich. It was a spiffing sandwich.

I admit it is not so much ‘toasted’ as ‘fried and baked’ but who cares when it is so good. Don’t hold back on the amount of cheese you use.

Simple to make, here’s how you do it:

Grate loads of cheese. Most of it should be very mature cheddar, but we also used some Wensleydale and Comte in the mix. Hawksmoor at Home suggest Ogleshield, but that is less easy to get and only does it for me so much.

Finely chop a red onion, two shallots and a green chilli and mix them in with the grated cheese. Spoon this cheese and onion mix between two slices of white bread that have been buttered on the outside. Hawksmoor at Home suggest sourdough bread but that is disgusting so use characterful nice white bread instead. This is how much cheese you’ll be aiming for per sandwich:

Fry the sandwich in a pan for two minutes on either side. Should anything leak out just spoon it back inside.

Place the sandwich on a pre-heated baking tray and put it in an oven at 170 Celsius for ten minutes.

Serve with Meon Valley apple juice, or I had a diet coke because it was early. A beezer sandwich that’ll look like this:

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Some may recall, on my post about natural wine, a brief discussion with Fabio of Vinos Ambiz in which he agreed to send me a bottle of his wine as long as I was brutally honest about it. This post is the culmination of that bargain. I agreed to be honest, Fabio, and I most certainly will be, which is a bit of a shame as I had hoped for either a lot more or a lot less… When sampling Fabio’s wine we tried some variations on Scotch eggs, namely Heston Bulmenthal’s suggestions for their preparation.

Those of a warped bent will be pleased to know I have set this article to be published right when I’ll be going under the knife on Thursday morning. If the anaesthetic gets me or the surgeon cuts the wrong bit out you’ll know the last bottle I popped just as I’m popping my clogs. I would have hoped for something significantly more terrific for my terminal tipple, truthfully.

Garnacha 2010, Vinos Ambiz

This has a very ripe, alcoholic and fruity nose. And that’s it. It’s not dirty, faulty, complex or interesting; it’s just a rather ripe, rather young Grenache of supreme simplicity. I’m a bit let down by that, I was expecting either fantastic fireworks or florid flaws. It’s just a well-made, ordinary wine and I think such things are really boring. The palate has a surprising level of acidity for it’s ripeness level and varietal, but that’s all that is surprising about it. It is quite fruity, quite tannic and quite alcoholic. If you want me to tell you the things it has to excess those would be simplicity and lack of dimension. There is nothing at all bad about it, indeed it is a well-made wine of this style. It’s just not a style I give two hoots about. So thank you, Fabio, for showing me that natural wines can be clean, lack faults and well-made, but next time we get into an argument send something that has more complexity that I can get worked up about, eh? I’d prefer a lot more interest-value of even the ‘flawed to buggery’-type rather than simply ‘dull’.

Just to note, this is bottle number 213 of 300 made, so I have poured away most of 0.3% of the entire production. Hmmm… 213 bottles, that is about how many I made in total from fruit when a teenager. I sold most to fellow pupils at school – that seemed just fine to me. I did it just to cover costs and for educational reasons, you understand. I wanted them to tell me how I should improve future batches I made. I never got any coherent responses to that question and I was far too naive to know why…

We drank the small tastes we had with some Scotch eggs; indubitably orbs of the moment. These used Greenfield Pork Products sausage meat. It was perfectly adequate, but not as good as the best we’ve used.

The major changes were those suggested by Heston in The Sun On Sunday last weekend. Not that I read a dreadful English rag of a newspaper you understand. Well, apart from The Economist. He suggests that the best way of boiling eggs is to put them in a pan of cold water, bring to the boil, then take off the heat and leave for 6 minutes before cooling the eggs. As you can see from the picture, this resulted in eggs too well-cooked to have runny yolks.

His second suggestion was to only deep fry the orbs for 2 minutes then finish them off in an oven at 190 Celsius for 100 minutes. This is supposed to make them more golden, which I am not convinced it did. All-in-all, nil points for Heston and his egg bonkersness, it seems.

Fabio, I’m sorry I didn’t either love or hate your wine any more than I did. It was good-ish, but in a manner that holds no interest at all for me. Many thanks for sending me the bottle, though, and I hope you enjoy the bacon that finally made it to you.

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I present a recipe for the ultimate Hampshire sandwich – the Hampwich. You need to go to a Hampshire Farmers’ Market to make one of these, but I suppose if you have sadly found yourself living in some other part of the world there may be ingredients almost as good near you.

Like many good things the Hampwich is a celebration of pleasure and excess, you don’t want to hold back with any of the ingredients as they are all so good.

The first ingredient you’ll need is some smoked brown trout (pictured left). The best place to get this is the New Forest Smokery (click to email them), their produce is smashing salamander quality. When you’re buying some of this also get some hot-smoked brown trout as I love that too (Editor Daniel is no fan of hot smoked fish but no one can be right all the time). The two 145g packets I’ve shown each contain four slices and so each packet is enough for two Hampwiches.

Next requirement is Alresford watercress. The Romans first acclaimed Alresford watercress to be the best in the world and it doesn’t seem like a couple of millennia of mankind farming it have ruined those properties of the area. The watercress has a powerful peppery bite and a crisp texture. I know it’s a green thing and so probably seriously unhealthy, but it is delicious and a necessary ingedient in the Hampwich. I’ve pictured two bundles of the size you normally get in the market and one will do for four Hampwiches.

You will also need muffins and King’s Somborne eggs to fry. Do you know how to fry eggs? I bet you don’t so I’ll tell you.

If you think of high-heat frying and whites that have crispy brown bits around the edges then you don’t deserve eggs as good as King’s Somborne’s. Doing that just makes the whites rubbery, those crispy bits don’t taste very nice anyway, and the bits of white and yolk that are not carbonised have very little flavour left. Instead, use a pan small enough to just hold the amount of eggs you are cooking. Put in a good slug of oil and put it over the lowest heat you can manage.

Cook the eggs until there is a touch of uncooked white left on the top of them and the yolks remain almost entirely liquid. Just as a rule of thumb, if you are not one of those insane people who like crispy bacon but rather like it to be able to bend and taste of bacon, it takes about the same time to fry eggs as it does to get bacon perfectly cooked (which, again, you don’t need an incinerating level of heat to achieve). Eggs cooked like this will not have the texture of tyres and there’ll be plenty of runny bits to soak into your muffins and watercress.

As the eggs are slowly cooking slice open your muffins and toast the inside of them. Butter the insides and layer on your smoked brown trout. This is how much brown trout you should be aiming for on a muffin:

Then put a fried egg on top, cover with chopped watercress and put the top of the muffin on. You now have a Hampwich ready to eat, ideally with some Meon Valley apple juice, but undoubtedly with an awfully large amount of pleasure.

As a potential improvement, I said to Dani after eating my lunch of two Hampwiches, “You know, next time possibly a tiny bit less trout but almost definitely some more watercress.” He fell off his chair and looked stunned; I can only imagine he was on the cider rather than apple juice.

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Sometimes you find yourself stuck with some perfectly adequate but ultimately dull wine. I decided to cook up some Hyden Organics chicken in Riesling I just couldn’t face drinking and added some guinea fowl pieces just for laughs.

When you are making a chicken casserole it is very important that you don’t use only breasts. They don’t provide enough flavour and only go dry, stringy and tough. I used chicken thighs and guinea fowl legs, thighs and wings. They provide flavour, especially as they come from well-treated birds.

The recipe is simple, but the end product rewarding. Here’s how you do it with birds and wine.

Chop up 250 grams of unsmoked, dry-cure streaky bacon into 2-3cm pieces. Put this in a casserole along with 6 crushed cloves of garlic and an embarrassingly dissolute slug of decent olive oil. Start this frying with occasional stirs until the bacon is cooked.

Then add 3 finely chopped leeks and a chopped onion and sweat them with the bacon, garlic and oil for 4-5 minutes until they are soft.

Add 300 grams roughly chopped mushrooms of reasonable character – flavour is what we always want plenty of. Then drop in about a kilo of tasty bits of bird.

I was rather chuffed to have bits of both guinea fowl and chicken to hand, but just using chicken is fine, as long as they are not breasts. Make sure your bird bits are of decent quality, not broiler bird filth. Hyden Organics provide the very best in winged meat (here’s my previous piece on them). Leave bones in thighs and legs for extra tastiness.

Then you can finally get rid of that blowsy, simple Riesling you don’t want to drink; I would definitely go for a fat, blowsy one rather than a lean, acidic little number, so this is a fine recipe for getting rid of excess Zind-Humbrecht. I got rid of some Trimbach Mandelberg 2003 that I never understood quite why I bought it. To almost cover all of the casserole ingredients you’ll need about a bottle full. If you need a bit more liquid then add some chicken stock.

Add loads and loads of salt and ground pepper, then bring this joyous concoction to the boil. Stick a lid on the pot and turn the heat down to the lowest simmer your hob will manage. Let it stew for 50-60 minutes.

Five minutes before time is up stir in about 150ml of double cream and then serve it all up on some buttered pasta-y noodles of whatever variety excites you. It’s nice if you sprinkle some chopped dill on top of each portion. Eat with grunts of visceral delight.

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