Food & Ingredients

Pasta comes in many shapes and forms, and it’s a very popular food all around the world. Quick to cook, a bowl of pasta can be ready in less than 10 minutes making it the ideal convenience food. You can buy pasta that’s ready to cook at the supermarket. There is either the dried type […]

In the modern world, we are blessed with an abundance of different oils for cooking, providing lots of versatility and choice. But for many chefs, professional chefs included, rapeseed oil comes top of the list. Renowned for its high smoke point and very low levels of saturated fat, refined rapeseed oil is also flavourless which

Cauliflower cheese is a traditional side dish which takes a classic vegetable and adds a creamy and indulgent twist. Cauliflower florets are covered with sauce and then baked in the oven for around 20 minutes at 400°F (200°C). The sauce is typically made from mature cheddar melted into milk and butter with some flour stirred

Most American recipes have ingredients that can easily be substituted and picked up in UK supermarkets. They have different brand names and subtly different ingredients but are essentially the same product. However, finding an equivalent to Nabisco Nilla Wafers is a challenging task. These are small, circular, wafer cookies flavoured with vanilla most commonly used

Scales are by far the most accurate measuring tools in the kitchen, but they’re not always available. If you need to measure out 100g of flour without scales, there are four alternative methods you can use. With a bit of ingenuity and concentration, you’ll be able to accurately measure different amounts of flour in seconds,

There’s no doubt about it, making lasagne from scratch can be something of an artform, and one that often isn’t truly mastered unless Italian blood runs through your veins! A common problem when cooking lasagne is the pasta sheets often remain hard, even after fully cooking the dish. We look at why lasagne sheets are

Many store-bought vegetable bouillon powders can be harsh on the palate, as they contain a lot of sodium, as well as other preservatives and additives. This can often result in an unnaturally salty effect in your food. You might also be cooking a recipe that calls for vegetable bouillon powder but not have any in

The term “beige buffet” has no clear origin, and it seems to just be a colloquial phrase given to buffet foods that are plain in colour and generally carbohydrate-based or put together using processed and pre-prepared oven foods. The term refers to the beige colouring of the foods and the overall visual effect of the

Many American recipes include vegetable shortening on their ingredients list. Vegetable shortening is a solid, white fat made from 100% vegetable oils that is used for baking and frying. Oils have higher melting points than butter, so shortening stays solid for longer than butter when it’s heated. This makes it great in baking when trying

There is no easy answer to this question, but the short version is this: Yes, golden syrup might eventually go off and turn bad, but it has a very, very long shelf life and will usually last for a lot longer than the packaging indicates.   Properly stored and sealed golden syrup can last for two